Sam Foster at the Lonely Conservative was the first to predict that the “treasure trove” of electronic data discovered at Osama’s Pakistan compound would turn out to include computer porn. Now Reuters reports:
A stash of pornography was found in the hideout of Osama bin Laden by the U.S. commandos who killed him, current and former U.S. officials said on Friday.
The pornography recovered in bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive, according to the officials, who discussed the discovery with Reuters on condition of anonymity.
“Pakistan reserves the right to retaliate with full force. No one should underestimate the resolve and capability of our nation and armed forces to defend our sacred homeland,” Gilani said.
Ace has a Ace has a Donald Rumsfeld post: “You Know, When You Discover An ‘Intelligence Jackpot,’ It’s Probably Best Not To Tell People You’ve Discovered an Intelligence Jackpot.”
This is a crucial point that has come home to me while doing various things here in the graveyard of empires:
Civil law is chess; war, poker.
While supporting and defending the right of the Left to be rubes, study rube-ology, and invite others to cower beneath their rube-ric, rubes must be kept clear of the levers of power. Period.
The contradictory impulses stirred by the death of Osama bin Laden have sent the Left and their media friends stumbling into absurdity. Do you remember how we were told that the election of President Obama would restore U.S. international prestige and make the world love us? Tell that to the Pakistanis:
A senior Pakistani intelligence official reacted angrily Wednesday to comments by CIA Director Leon Panetta, who told U.S. lawmakers in a closed-door session Tuesday that Pakistani officials were either “involved or incompetent” in bin Laden’s case — and, “Neither is a good place to be.”
The official, who did not want to be named, said his country had been generously sharing intelligence with its American counterparts.
“Of all people,” the Pakistani official said, Panetta “knows how much we have been doing.” “What worse statement can come than that we heard from Panetta?” the official said. “I am afraid this statement is totally regrettable.”
Here’s the CNN video report:
And here’s a similar report from ABC News:
What’s so absurd about this is how, on the one hand, it’s blindingly obvious that important people in Pakistani must have been helping protect bin Laden, while on the other hand, they pretend to be angry at us for suspecting them of collusion with al Qaeda, and complain about us intruding on their turf to take him out. Yet we must now tiptoe around (“We don’t need to spike the football“) for fear of offending their sensibilities. But wait — there’s more! Continue reading Bin Laden Dead; Liberal Media Sick →
In an interview with Steve Kroft for this Sunday’s 60 Minutes, President Obama says he won’t release post-mortem images of Osama bin Laden taken to prove his death. . . . Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said Wednesday that the Obama administration should not release the gruesome post-mortem images, saying it could complicate the job for American troops overseas. Rogers told CBS News he has seen a post-mortem photo.
“The risks of release outweigh the benefits,” he said. “Conspiracy theorists around the world will just claim the photos are doctored anyway, and there is a real risk that releasing the photos will only serve to inflame public opinion in the Middle East.”
“If you’re a sergeant in a town in Ghazni, Afghanistan and you’re trying to get some local elder to cooperate about what’s happening in your village, are you going to do it if this inflames into some kind of trophy — we have a trophy of Osama bin Laden? I worry about that,” Rogers told [George Stephanopoulos]. “And if we can’t answer for sure and for certain this doesn’t make the job of that soldier easier, if it makes it harder, I say it’s not worth it.”
Just saw Fox News interview John McCain, who said: “My initial opinion is that it’s not necessary to [release the photos].”
If he sticks to this, it’s a bad move in my opinion. If the photo is being withheld out of sensitivity to Muslims, we are once again baptizing Osama bin Laden into mainstream Islam, after years of telling the world that OBL wasn’t a good Muslim. Stupid. Obama has just created his own pet version of the Warren Commission Report. If Obama sticks to this decision, we’ll get a lifetime of bad Photoshops and conspiracy theories out of it. And the radicals who want to kill us will still want to kill us.
UPDATE IV: In a White House briefing just now, spokesman Jay Carney said, “It’s not in our national security interests” to release the photos.
Right: But one way or another, the photos will be public within weeks — perhaps within days. The National Enquirer will pay somebody $50,000, the photos will be leaked, and then the White House will engage in public hand-wringing about how “irresponsible” it is for the Enquirer to publish the photos.
Does the phrase “plausible deniability” ring a bell?
As for our betters who say don’t release the photos because it might inflame the Religion of Peace into a murderous rage (a state also known as “everyday”) …everyone of you bastards better be on record either urging the withholding of or condemning the release of photos from Abu Ghraib.
UPDATE XI:Professor Glenn Reynolds: “This seems like a mistake to me, and the double-shuffle of contradictory messages that has led up to this decision hasn’t looked ready for prime time.”
Rather than bomb the compound, Obama (after 16 hours of deliberation and a half-round of golf) made the “gutsy” call to send SEAL troops into harm’s way so that he could make sure the US had proof of death. This was a “Kill Only” mission, we’re told — and the SEAL “assaulters” dutifully shot the unarmed bin Laden and his young bride. Obama then ordered a 45-minute burial ceremony, performed Arabic, in which bin Laden’s “Kill Only” corpse was cleaned and dressed and placed in a burial shroud. Then dumped into the sea.
And now Obama is saying he won’t release the proof of death he claimed was so vital — and Andrea Mitchell, among others, is satisfied with this: the government has all the proof it needs, so why show anyone else? Per Mitchell, we’re inherently to trust the government. Because it isn’t a Republican in the White House. So it must be good and righteous.
And besides, we don’t want to offend Muslim sensibilities. After all, there’s no telling how these inherently peaceful people might react to photos of a dead bin Laden, who doesn’t represent Islam in any way.
Like I said: “Plausible deniability.” The photo will leak, and the official reaction from the White House will be to denounce the leak. But this is just about maintaining appearances.
Sadly, I suspect the possibility of permanently elevating ObL to a near mythical stature was disregaded in favor of a more self-serving domestic political calculus.
Really: Why is it that jihadis post online videos of the executions of innocent Americans (e.g., Daniel Pearl) and yet, when we finally get the world’s most bloodthirsty terrorist, we can’t publish the photo because we’re afraid of inflaming “the Arab street”? I don’t give a damn one way or another whether they publish the photos, but I very much give a damn about U.S. officials kowtowing to the sensitivities of such savages: “Oh, we don’t want to offend them.”
They need to be offended, and often, and by someone who knows how.
Since taking over the 8 p.m. spot vacated by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell has mounted an extraordinary effort to achieve what many would consider an impossible goal: Being more absurdly self-righteous than Olbermann.
Tuesday night, O’Donnell may have reached that mark by asserting that John Kerry was the gold standard in national security policy:
(Via Memeorandum.) Is O’Donnell serious? Did he even listen to his own video clip, when Kerry said that fighting terrorism “requires cooperation around the world”? In point of fact, although the U.S. shoveled out all kinds of foreign aid to Pakistan, we did not get that kind of cooperation. It wasn’t “cooperation” that resulted in finding Osama bin Laden: It was the “enhanced interrogation” of detainees captured by the CIA and U.S. military during the Bush presidency — interrogations that Democrats condemned, involving terrorists they insisted were being detained illegally. And the raid that killed bin Laden was conducted by military Special Operations troops (a branch of the service increased under Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure as Secretary of Defense), not by “law enforcement,” and certainly not by the European allies that Kerry kept insisting should be granted veto authority over U.S. policy.
All of which is to say that the facts are 180 degrees out of phase with O’Donnell’s argument. With complete disregard for facts, O’Donnell evidently believes that counterfactual things can be made true merely by his say-so. “Fiat lux!”
My God, did you ever believe you’d see such a thing? O’Donnell has got me pining for the Good Old Days of Keith Olbermann!
But some things remain constant at MSNBC, especially the familiar douchebaggery of Chris Matthews who, amid his otherwise giddy celebration of the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s successful assassination of a Muslim leader, described Dick Cheny as a “sadist” :
Did you see that? It was a complete non sequitur. They were sitting there praising all Obama’s wonders when Howard Fineman mentioned Dick Cheney, so out of the blue, for no discernible reason whatsoever, Matthews says: “There’s a difference between being cold blooded — I think presidents have to be cold blooded — and being a sadist.” Howard Fineman then begins to say something else, but Matthews interrupts: “I was referring to Cheney, of course.”
Fineman, certainly no fan of Dick Cheney, wisely ignored that idiotic remark. You really have to feel sorry for the guests on Matthews’s show, who have to sit there and be polite while he blabs out that kind of nonsense.
Congress should cut off foreign aid to Pakistan “unless we get a clear explanation” of whether the Pakistani government “was harboring Osama bin Laden,” Rep. Allen West (R-Florida) said in a letter sent Tuesday to the chairwoman of the House subcommittee that oversees foreign aid programs.
In the letter, West said that, “like many Americans,” he had believed bin Laden was hiding in northwest Pakistan’s tribal regions, where it would have been “very difficult to locate any individual, especially the most wanted terrorist in the world.”
“However, we now learn that Osama bin Laden was living in a million-dollar compound which was custom-built in 2005 in Abbotabad . . . The heavily fortified compound . . . is only a few hundred yards from the Pakistan Military Academy,” West wrote in the lettter to Granger. “It is not unreasonable for the American people to question if Osama bin Laden was located on government-controlled land, next to a military academy, and so close to the nation’s capital. What real assistance was the Pakistan Government providing for the last 10 years to locate the al-Qaeda leader and bring him to justice?”
West wrote: “I think it is quite clear that unless we get a clear explanation of what the Government of Pakistan knew abojut the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, all foreign aid from American taxpayers to this nation needs to cease. We need to understand whether the Government of Pakistan was harboring Osama bin Laden all these years.”
West, a retired Army lieutenant-colonel, served in Iraq with the 4th Infantry Division. He was elected to Congress in Florida’s 22nd District last year with strong support from the Tea Party movement, and is a member of the House Armed Services Committee.
UPDATE: West’s suspicions about the Pakistani government’s relationship with bin Laden would appear justified by comments from CIA Director Leon Panetta. In an interview with Time magazine, Panetta said that U.S. officials ruled out informing Islamabad of their plans to get the al-Qaeda leader because “it was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission. They might alert the targets.”
UPDATE II: Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) today announced plans to introduce the Pakistan Foreign Aid Accountability Act, which “would require the State Department to certify to Congress that Pakistan wasn’t giving a sanctuary to the former world’s most wanted terrorist,” the Houston Chronicle reports:
Poe noted that Congress has already appropriated $3 billion to Pakistan for the year, and said unless the State Department can show that the country wasn’t harboring bin Laden, it should not receive “one more cent of American aid.”
“This is exactly why we need to reevaluate the foreign aid that we send to countries that do not have America’s best interest in mind,” he said.
The White House backed away Monday evening from key details in its narrative about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, including claims by senior U.S. officials that the Al Qaeda leader had a weapon and may have fired it during a gun battle with U.S. forces.
Officials also retreated from claims that one of bin Laden’s wives was killed in the raid and that bin Laden was using her as a human shield before she was shot by U.S. forces.
I can’t imagine that the anti-war left will stand quietly for much longer while President Obama does a victory lap for snuffing an unarmed old man no matter how much they may want him re-elected.
But who cares? Consistent non-partisan peaceniks tend to be kooks like Cindy Sheehan and fanatics like Glenn Greenwald. From the political perspective of the White House, who cares whether a relative handful of cranks and crackpots whine about this? I don’t seem to recall a sudden exodus of peaceniks from the Democrat Party when Bill Clinton ordered relentless bombing of Serbia in “The War of Monica’s Thong.”
How did we go from “Bin Laden had a weapon and was using his wife as a human shield” to “Bin Laden was unarmed and didn’t have a human shield” in the span of 24 hours when there’s apparently helmet-cam footage of the whole raid? Surely, surely, the White House knew that conspiracy cranks and naysayers would cite every discrepancy in the official narrative as “proof” that Bin Laden’s still alive or whatever.
Video of Jay Carney’s White House press conference:
