Yes, He Did: Reflections On The Aftermath Of Bin Laden's Death: PT 1

I had fallen asleep early Saturday evening, so I missed the good news. But, upon awaking Sunday morning, I was bombarded with Tweets and Facebook updates that revealed not just that we had finally killed the preeminent terrorist of a generation, but that that very action had further divided the nation it was intended to bring together.

In the interest of full disclosure and honesty, I had - for some years, come to believe that Bin Laden had been killed and no one was really reporting this fact because his communications - primarily audio only heard by a select few - were unusually timed with specific Bush Era political moves. Not to go all "Alex Jones" on you, but the fact that Benazir Bhutto claimed to have actionable intel regarding Bin Laden's assassination, I was inclined to more than moderately embrace that theory.

But back to the point at hand.

The first thing that immediately jumped out at me was the fact that the Modern American Right, with unblushing intensity, refused to acknowledge that the Obama administration should be recognized for this victory. And that, to me, tells me that now more than ever, they can't define what the word "victory" means in regards to military action overseas.

What they did do was something I thought quite peculiar, considering their metric for praise prior to Obama's election - they claimed that Bush was responsible for Bin Laden being killed by military action. But this wasn't just about Bush, it was about "waterboarding". It wasn't about techniques proven to provide intel that could immediately acted upon, it was about something that Liberals/Progressives knew was untrustworthy. If "waterboarding" was such a glorious tool for gleaning intel from terrorist detainees, why couldn't the Bush administration accomplish this task in as timely a fashion as the Obama administration did?

Unfortunately, for the Right, this poorly conceived rationalization is false. Donald Rumsfeld has even denied that "waterboarding" was a factor in all of this. But don't tell that to Jim Hoft ( aka: GatewayPundit - someone who is consistently sourced for the "Fair And Balanced" hate-site that is known as Fox"Nation" ). He's also pushing for a new conspiracy - that Obama knew that it was Bin Laden living in that compound since last Fall. The only problem with this is that they were only aware of a compound and not who lived there.

The scrambling and twitching efforts of the Modern American Right to denounce the actions of the Obama administration show not only their desperation, but their own knowledge that the Bush administration failed for nearly 10 years where the Obama administration succeeded in less than 3.

More to come tomorrow.............

Who Will Follow Up On This?

Granted, the bulk of the documents that Wikileaks has obtained are largely speculative and need further investigation, one segment that Wired is reporting on merits some follow-up.

according to one of the WikiLeaks logs, Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security got a tip about the man at the very top of the most wanted list: Osama Bin Laden himself. The informant said that Bin Laden “had been transported to Peshawar hospital in Pakistan for treatment, where he has died.”

“NDS stressed that this was a single source report and had not been verified,” the log added. No other document in the WikiLeaks trove appears to corroborate this. So it looks like just another piece of RUMINT in a war full of it.

RUMINT is short for "rumored intelligence". But even rumors of this sort need to be looked into, especially considering that Benazir Bhutto, a woman with intimate knowledge of the happenings in her region, stated back in 2007 that Bin Laden had been murdered.

Let's postulate on why this piece of intel wasn't seriously researched. Firstly, it would put a massive dent into the Bush administration's desire to continue fighting in Afghanistan, even though his tenure would end less than 2 years later. Secondly, and more than likely most importantly, the Bush administration couldn't possibly admit that a foreign country had accomplished something that he had loudly and all too often boasted about American forces doing.

There have been theories and rumors that Bin Laden had died much earlier than 2007, but none had been substantiated by anyone of prominence like Benazir Bhutto. All previous speculations were framed in the context of tin-foil hat nutjob nonsense. As for me, this needs to be seriously reviewed and have proper context be revealed to the American public. After all, this is the most wanted man in the world we are talking about. But considering how this has been completely ignored since 2007, there's going to have to be a great deal of explaining why so many have been so silent.