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I was naturally delighted to hear the news that Osama Bin Laden came to a sticky end at the hands of US SpecOps and the importance of that far outweighed my wish that someone other than the dismal Barack Obama was in the White House to take the credit.
But the extraordinarily inept manner in which the post-hit PR has been handled is just adding to the joy of the moment for me… the weird and unseemly hasty ‘burial at sea’, almost as if they are actively trying to incite the legions of conspiracy theories out there, followed by contradictory accounts of what happened and what the mission’s brief actually was…
…he was killed because he resisted arrest… no, he was killed because that was the mission objective… he was armed… no he wasn’t… he used his wife as a human shield… no he didn’t… well yes but it wasn’t his wife… or not… this son was killed… no, some other son was killed… and so on and so on…
We could be looking at the best possible outcome here: Osama dead and Obama and his team snatching PR defeat from the jaws of victory. This just keeps getting better and better!
Some people are just neurotically sceptical. But even they won’t deny what is before their eyes. Is there anyone who seriously questions the fact that Saddam Hussein is dead? That’s the way to do things these days. Don’t launch a bloody, decade defining series of wars and then refuse to release photos of a dead body, or better still display the actual body, because you’re worried it’ll upset people. Shoot the ****** in the head on camera then release it on youtube.
– Commenter ub313 on Ed West‘s Daily Telegraph site blog
The US Navy SEALs are a remarkable group of individuals, as events in the Middle East highlight. Here is a book about their training by an author I rate, Dick Couch.
In the end, given sufficient force and a pinch of luck, the US was able to get bin Laden. I think that is a very important message to get into the grey matter between the ears of jihadists.
I have been reading some comments over at Facebook and elsewhere about how vulgar and unseemly it is for people to celebrate the death of this man. Forgive me if I spare the tears. This won’t bring back all those people killed by his outfit, of course, but a sort of justice of sorts has been done.
I just returned from a night at the pub with a journalist friend and no sooner had I arrived home than I heard the news. Osama bin Laden is dead. May he rest in pieces and be fed to pigs. Maybe we could even put his head on a pike in front of the White House for a few days and spread bread crumbs around it so the pigeons will roost there… and we could encourage people to walk their dogs around the pike…
Am I sounding barbaric? Yep. He is very “special”.
Yes Lawrence of Arabia is showing on Channel Five, now. I’ve been only half or less paying attention, but I heard this loud and clear:
“Money. It’ll have to be sovereigns. They don’t like paper.”
Said by Lawrence to Allenby, on how to pay the Arabs to fight against the Turks.
He would agree, as would all our mutual friends here.
This is a point of view which is now spreading rather fast.
There is finally some news on the Polywell fusion tests that are under funding by the Office of Naval Research. This, as you may remember, is the project started by Dr. Bussard before his death and the one ‘small fusion’ project most of us take very seriously.
The report that it operated the way it was supposed to says a great deal to those of us who have been following them for the last several years.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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