FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. — President Obama on Friday privately thanked the U.S. Special Forces who killed Osama bin Laden. “Job well done,” he said of their daring raid.In a series of closed-door meetings, Mr. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden met with some of the Special Operations forces who went on the raid in Pakistan and with members of the assault force who supported the mission.The President later addressed more than 2,000 soldiers in a hangar at Fort Campbell. “I came here for a simple reason: to say thank you on behalf of all America. This has been a historic week in the life of our nation,” he said. “Thanks to the incredible skill and courage of countless individuals, intelligence, military, over many years, the terrorist leader who struck our nation on 9/11 will never threaten America again.” The President said he had visited New York the day before to pay homage to the victims of bin Laden’s 2001 terrorist attacks and to the firefighters and police who responded to the catastrophe.“I promised that our nation will never forget those we lost that dark September day,” he said.“And today, here at Fort Campbell, I had the privilege of meeting the extraordinary Special Ops folks who honored that promise,” he said. “It was a chance for me to say, ‘On behalf of all Americans and people around the world, job well done. Job well done.’”During the meeting with the SEAL team, Mr. Obama awarded it and other units involved in the operation a Presidential Unit Citation, the White House said. The President also received a PowerPoint presentation on the raid, with maps, photos, and a scale model of the compound, from members of the assault force. Even the trained dog used in the raid attended.Speaking later to the troops of the 101st Airborne Division, he drew another connection, between the soldiers there and the commandos he called “America’s quiet professionals.”“Like all of us, they could have chosen a life of ease,” the President said. “But like you, they volunteered.”Describing the SEAL commandos as “battle hardened” and tirelessly trained, Mr. Obama said: “When I gave the order, they were ready. And in recent days, the world has learned just how ready they were.”While the SEAL team is not based at Fort Campbell, it is home of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers. The unit, which pilots aircraft for Special Operations troops, flew the helicopters that carried the commandos to bin Laden’s compound.Mr. Obama linked the killing of bin Laden to the broader war, saying it showed the progress the United States had made in disrupting and dismantling al-Qaeda. The soldiers of the 101st Airborne, he said, were pushing back insurgents and allowing Afghans to reclaim their towns. “The bottom line is this,” he said in a statement that drew the loudest cheers of the day, “our strategy is working, and there is no greater evidence of that than justice finally being delivered to Osama bin Laden.” Among the soldiers, there was satisfaction at the killing of bin Laden. Several said they were relieved, though most said they did not believe it would bring the Afghan war to an end any sooner.“It helps to know that we finally got him,” said Sgt. Marion Githens, who coordinated Army helicopters at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan before returning to the United States two days ago. But she said she was still ambivalent about the war. “Some days, you feel like it’s not going anywhere,” she said. “Other days, you think, OK, maybe we really can help these people.”Soldiers expressed gratitude Mr. Obama had come. “It’s tough coming home,” said Capt. Jimos Reese, a company commander. “It does mean a lot that the President cares about you.”The Pentagon recommended Mr. Obama come to Fort Campbell, a senior official said, because the 101st Airborne had taken significant casualties, having served in a Taliban stronghold south and west of Kandahar that is some of the most lethal terrain in Afghanistan.Mr. Obama acknowledged that, noting 125 soldiers from the base had died in Afghanistan. Some soldiers in the 101st Airborne, he said, had been deployed to Afghanistan three or four times.Among those who greeted the President at Fort Campbell was Vice Adm. William McRaven, a former commando in the SEALs who oversaw the raid as the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command. After Mr. Obama’s arrival, the President’s motorcade left immediately for low buildings on the far side of the airfield, where the meeting with the SEAL team and other units lasted more than an hour.The meetings were kept private to protect the identities of those involved and to shield them from becoming targets of terrorist reprisals. In his speech to the troops, Mr. Obama said the American military had “broken the Taliban’s momentum” to promote terrorism in Afghanistan.“We are ultimately going to defeat al-Qaeda,” the President said to loud cheers. But he said he didn’t want to fool anyone. “This continues to be a tough fight.”Soldiers were careful not to celebrate bin Laden’s death, voicing instead a sense of professional pride for the work of the commandos.“We’re not done,” said Major Luis Ortiz.

3:23 P.M. CDT

THE VICE PRESIDENT:  Hey, it’s good to be back with you all. I’ll tell you what.  I want to thank General Colt for accompanying me up here.  I get the honor of introducing the General.

I was back here on February 11th, to welcome home members of the 3rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team in Afghanistan -- 155 of you got off that plane in the middle of the night, and the only thing that was more exciting than seeing you getting off is watching your families watch you all get off.  So it’s an honor to be back here so soon.

I know many of you have just gotten home in the past few weeks -- so welcome home.  And I know from experience that your families want more than anything to spend time with you.  And so, every time I show up at a welcome home ceremony, I’m always worried about getting in the way.  Because I remember when my son came back home from Iraq after a year, there were all these ceremonies.  And I kept saying, hell, man, stop, I want to see my kid.  (Laughter.)

So, anyway, I get it.  So let me just say how much gratitude the President and I have, and all Americans do, for you all.  You guys have been in the fight from the beginning.  And the risk you’ve taken, the incredible sacrifices you’ve made, the comrades you’ve lost, the losses you’ve personally endured -- you’ve been in some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world.

I’ve been there a number of times, back up those damn mountains.  I’d get a helicopter to go down 9,800 feet, and all I got on is a vest -- a bulletproof vest and a helmet and I’m out of breath climbing up about 40 clicks -- 40 feet.  And you guys are up there, 60 to 80-pound packs running around.  God, you’re amazing.  You just are amazing.  I’m in awe of the job you do, in awe of the job you do.  (Applause.)

As I said back in February, I want to also thank your families.  They made sacrifices as well, those intangible sacrifices -- those missed births and those missed birthdays, those missed graduations, those missed -- an occasional funeral. Perhaps more than anything else, just being missed, just not having you home.

The famous poet -- there was a famous poet I like to quote, John Milton, who said, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Your families serve as well.  And the rest of America owes your families a debt of gratitude as well.  (Applause.)  And so, to all the families that are listening, I want to say their service is as real as yours and it’s as appreciated.

To the soldiers here, you are the most capable warriors.  Let me say this without any fear of contradiction, you’re the most capable warriors in the history of the world.  There has never, never, never, never been a fighting force as capable as you are.

It’s my job today and my honor to talk a little bit about the man that I get to work with every day.  We’ve just got to spend time with the assaulters who got bin Laden.  (Applause.)

By the way, I shouldn’t say this, but I’m going to tell you anyway -- the President is going to be mad I’m taking so long -- (laughter) -- but today was “Grandfather’s Day,” so I went by earlier this morning before I came out here to my granddaughter’s little spring play.  And after it’s all over she said, “Pop, come back to my classroom with me.”  I said, “I can’t, honey.”  She said, “Are you going someplace on Air Force Two?”  I said, “Yeah, I am, babe.”  She said, “Where are you going?”  I said, going to -- true story -- I said, “I’m going to Fort Campbell.”  I said, “We’re going to see the guys out there who got Osama bin Laden.” Absolutely true story.  She said, “Pop!” and then she grabbed a little friend of hers and she said,  “My Pop is going out to see the whales.”  (Laughter.)  Not the SEALs, the whales  (Laughter.) Because if they’re that good they got to be big, man.  They got to be big.  (Laughter.)  Well, you guys are the gorillas, I’ll tell you.

I want to tell you, look, I’ve watched -- I’ve been around a while with eight Presidents, so I’ve watched Presidents make some difficult decisions.  They’ve all had to make difficult decisions.  But sitting in every meeting getting ready and planning for this mission and assault, for the mission to get bin Laden, I saw something extraordinary.  I saw a President who was told the odds -- told the odds weren’t but much more than 50/50 that he’d be there and we could do this, but they were considerably less than 100 percent.

And I, along with the all the rest of his national security team and Secretary of Defense, stayed -- everyone else, we sat around there and he asked our advice and we gave him our advice, and we told him told him a little this and that.  And finally, he just looked at all of us and said, I got faith in the -- I got faith in these guys.

He walked off on his own without anybody giving him any guarantees at all and he decided -- because he believed in not only the SEALs, but believes in all of you.  He has absolute total faith in all of you.  And he made that determination, and it was an amazing thing to watch.  But it was because he had the absolute confidence that you were there.

And so he decided, when he got into office, because of the fight you all were in from the beginning, that the number one priority was to get Osama bin Laden.  And he knew the risks, he knew there were significant risks, and more importantly, special operations risks to the people who were risking their lives getting there.  But he didn’t hesitate, nor did your guys.

Bob Gates said something interesting.  I’ve known Bob for a long time.  He said, it was one of the gutsiest decisions I’ve ever seen made and one of the gutsiest raids.  This is going to go down in history, what happened.  This is going to go down in history.

And here to introduce your Commander-in-Chief, the guy that I’m proud to serve with, is one of the country’s leading warriors himself, Deputy Commanding General of the 101st Airborne Division, General Jeffrey Colt.  Ladies and gentlemen, General Colt.  (Applause.)

GENERAL COLT:  Thank you, sir.

I can only try to tell you today just how proud of you that this Division and this local community are.  But more importantly, today, you’re going to get to hear from the Commander-in-Chief just how appreciative he is of all of your service and your sacrifices.

Please join me in this great privilege of welcoming the President of the United States, Barack Obama.  (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT:  Hello, Fort Campbell!  (Applause.)  101st Airborne Division—Air Assault, hello!  (Applause.)

General Colt, thank you for that great introduction -- it was great because it was brief.  (Laughter.)  More importantly, thank you for the extraordinary leadership that you’ve shown here at one of the largest Army bases in America.  (Applause.)

And let me just say, I make a lot of decisions; one of the earliest and best decisions I made was choosing one of the finest Vice Presidents in our history -- Joe Biden, right here.  (Applause.)

Chaplain Miller, thank you for the beautiful invocation.

I want to thank General Colt for welcoming me here today, along with your great Command Sergeant Major, Wayne St. Louis.  (Applause.)  The Quartet and 101st Division Band.  (Applause.)  All these troopers behind me —- you look great.  (Applause.)  You noticed they kind of hesitated.  (Laughter.)  

We got a lot of folks in the house.  We’ve got military police and medical personnel.  We’ve got the Green Berets of the 5th Special Forces Group.  I think we’ve got a few Air Force here.  Ohh -- (laughter.)  Well, we thought we did.  There they go -- okay.  Come on.  (Applause.)  And, of course, the legendary Screaming Eagles.  (Applause.)  And although they’re not in the audience, I want to acknowledge the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment —- the Night Stalkers -— for their extraordinary service.  (Applause.)

Now, I’ve got to say, some of you are starting to look a little familiar -- because last December, when we were at Bagram, I was out there to thank you for your service, especially during the holidays.  And we had a great rally, a big crowd -- it seemed like everybody was there from the 101st.

And since then, I know we’ve had quite a few homecomings.  The Rakkasans.  (Applause.)  Destiny.  (Applause.)  Strike.  (Applause.)  Bastogne.  (Applause.)  And some of the Division Headquarters —- the Gladiators.  (Applause.)  On behalf of a grateful nation —- welcome home.  (Applause.)   

Of course, our thoughts and prayers are with General Campbell, Command Sergeant Major Schroeder, and all of the Screaming Eagles and troops that are still risking their lives in theater.  And I’m so pleased that Ann Campbell and Marla Schroeder, and some of the inspiring military spouses are here.  Where are they at?  Right over there.  (Applause.)  We are grateful to you.  God bless you.  There they are.  Thank you so much.  (Applause.)  This happens to be Military Spouse Appreciation Day.  (Applause.)  And we honor your service as well.

Now, I didn’t come here to make a really long speech.  I know you're hearing that.  (Laughter.)  It’s like, yeah, it’s hot!  (Laughter.)  What I really wanted to do was come down and shake some hands.  I came here for a simple reason —- to say thank you on behalf of America.  This has been an historic week in the life of our nation.  (Applause.)  Thanks to the incredible skill and courage of countless individuals -— intelligence, military —- over many years, the terrorist leader who struck our nation on 9/11 will never threaten America again.  (Applause.)

Yesterday, I traveled to New York City, and, along with some of our 9/11 families, laid a wreath at Ground Zero in memory of their loved ones.  I met with the first responders —- the firefighters, the police officers, the Port Authority officers —- who lost so many of their own when they rushed into those burning towers.  I promised that our nation will never forget those we lost that dark September day.   

And today, here at Fort Campbell, I had the privilege of meeting the extraordinary Special Ops folks who honored that promise.  It was a chance for me to say —- on behalf of all Americans and people around the world —- “Job well done.”  Job well done.  (Applause.)

They’re America’s “quiet professionals” -- because success demands secrecy.  But I will say this.  Like all of you, they could have chosen a life of ease.  But like you, they volunteered.  They chose to serve in a time of war, knowing they could be sent into harm’s way.  They trained for years.  They’re battle-hardened.  They practiced tirelessly for this mission.  And when I gave the order, they were ready.

Now, in recent days, the whole world has learned just how ready they were.  These Americans deserve credit for one of the greatest intelligence military operations in our nation’s history.  But so does every person who wears America’s uniform, the finest military the world has ever known.  (Applause.)  And that includes all of you men and women of 101st.  (Applause.)

You have been on the frontlines of this fight for nearly 10 years.  You were there in those early days, driving the Taliban from power, pushing al Qaeda out of its safe havens.  Over time, as the insurgency grew, you went back for, in some cases, a second time, a third time, a fourth time.

When the decision was made to go into Iraq, you were there, too, making the longest air assault in history, defeating a vicious insurgency, ultimately giving Iraqis the chance to secure their democracy.  And you’ve been at the forefront of our new strategy in Afghanistan.

Sending you -- more of you -- into harm’s way is the toughest decision that I’ve made as Commander-in-Chief.  I don’t make it lightly.  Every time I visit Walter Reed, every time I visit Bethesda, I’m reminded of the wages of war.  But I made that decision because I know that this mission was vital to the security of the nation that we all love.

And I know it hasn’t been easy for you and it hasn’t, certainly, been easy for your families.  Since 9/11, no base has deployed more often, and few bases have sacrificed more than you.  We see it in our heroic wounded warriors, fighting every day to recover, and who deserve the absolute best care in the world.  (Applause.)  We see it in the mental and emotional toll that’s been taken -- in some cases, some good people, good soldiers who’ve taken their own lives.  So we’re going to keep saying to anybody who is hurting out there, don’t give up.  You’re not alone.  Your country needs you.  We’re here for you to keep you strong.

And most of all, we see the price of this war in the 125 soldiers from Fort Campbell who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice during this deployment to Afghanistan.  And every memorial ceremony —- every “Eagle Remembrance” —- is a solemn reminder of the heavy burdens of war, but also the values of loyalty and duty and honor that have defined your lives.

So here’s what each of you must know.  Because of your service, because of your sacrifices, we’re making progress in Afghanistan.  In some of the toughest parts of the country, General Campbell and the 101st are taking insurgents and their leaders off the battlefield and helping Afghans reclaim their communities.

Across Afghanistan, we’ve broken the Taliban’s momentum.  In key regions, we’ve seized the momentum, pushing them out of their strongholds.  We’re building the capacity of Afghans, partnering with communities and police and security forces, which are growing stronger.

And most of all, we’re making progress in our major goal, our central goal in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that is disrupting and dismantling -- and we are going to ultimately defeat al Qaeda.  (Applause.)  We have cut off their head and we will ultimately defeat them.  (Applause.)

Even before this week’s operation, we’ve put al Qaeda’s leadership under more pressure than at any time since 9/11, on both sides of the border.  So the bottom line is this:  Our strategy is working, and there’s no greater evidence of that than justice finally being delivered to Osama bin Laden.  (Applause.)

But I don’t want to fool you.  This continues to be a very tough fight.  You know that.  But because of this progress, we’re moving into a new phase.  In the coming months, we’ll start transferring responsibility for security to Afghan forces. Starting this summer, we’ll begin reducing American forces.  As we transition, we’ll build a long-term partnership with the Afghan people, so that al Qaeda can never again threaten America from that country.

And, as your Commander-in-Chief, I’m confident that we’re going to succeed in this mission.  The reason I’m confident is because in you I see the strength of America’s military -- (applause) -- and because in recent days we’ve all seen the resilience of the American spirit.

Now, this week I received a letter from a girl in New Jersey named Payton Wall.  She wrote to me on Monday after the news that bin Laden had been killed, and she explained how she still remembers that September morning almost 10 years ago.  She was only four years old.  Her father, Glen, was trapped inside the World Trade Center.  And so, in those final, frantic moments, knowing he might not make it, he called home.  And Payton remembers watching her mom sobbing as she spoke to her husband and then passed the phone to Payton.  And in words that were hard to hear but which she’s never forgotten, he said to her, “I love you Payton, and I will always be watching over you.”     

So yesterday, Payton, her mom, and her sister, Avery, joined me at Ground Zero.  And now Payton is 14.  These past 10 years have been tough for her.  In her letter, she said, “Ever since my father died, I lost a part of me that can never be replaced.”  And she describes her childhood as a “little girl struggling to shine through all the darkness in her life.”

But every year, more and more, Payton is shining through.  She’s playing a lot of sports, including lacrosse and track, just like her dad.  She’s doing well in school.  She’s mentoring younger students.  She’s looking ahead to high school in the fall.  And so, yesterday she was with us —- a strong, confident young woman -— honoring her father’s memory, even as she set her sights on the future.

And for her and for all of us, this week has been a reminder of what we’re about as a people.  It’s easy to forget sometimes, especially in times of hardship, times of uncertainty.  We’re coming out of the worst recession since the Great Depression; haven’t fully recovered from that.  We’ve made enormous sacrifices in two wars.  But the essence of America -- the values that have defined us for more than 200 years -- they don’t just endure; they are stronger than ever.

We’re still the America that does the hard things, that does the great things.  We’re the nation that always dared to dream.  We’re the nation that’s willing to take risks -- revolutionaries breaking free from an empire; pioneers heading West to settle new frontiers; innovators building railways and laying the highways and putting a man on the surface of the moon.

We are the nation -- and you’re the Division -- that parachuted behind enemy lines on D-Day, freeing a continent, liberating concentration camps.  We’re the nation that, all those years ago, sent your Division to a high school in Arkansas so that nine black students could get an education.  That was you.  Because we believed that all men are created equal; that everyone deserves a chance to realize their God-given potential.

We’re the nation that has faced tough times before -- tougher times than these.  But when our Union frayed, when the Depression came, when our harbor was bombed, when our country was attacked on that September day, when disaster strikes like that tornado that just ripped through this region, we do not falter.  We don’t turn back.  We pick ourselves up and we get on with the hard task of keeping our country strong and safe.

See, there’s nothing we can’t do together, 101st, when we remember who we are, at that is the United States of America.  (Applause.)  When we remember that, no problem is too hard and no challenge is too great.

And that is why I am so confident that, with your brave service, America’s greatest days are still to come.  (Applause.)

God bless you.  God bless the 101st.  And God bless the United States of America.  (Applause.)

END
3:47 P.M. CDT

Listen to the Audio

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now to those special military units that brought down Osama bin Laden.

Ray Suarez has that.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Hello, Fort Campbell!

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

RAY SUAREZ: The end of an eventful week found the president praising troops at Fort Campbell, Ky., after a very public victory in the long war against al-Qaida.

BARACK OBAMA: Thanks to the incredible skill and courage of countless individuals -- intelligence, military -- over many years, the terrorist leader who struck our nation on 9/11 will never threaten America again.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

RAY SUAREZ: But elsewhere on the sprawling base, well beyond the cameras' reach, the president earlier met with members of the special operations team that killed bin Laden.

BARACK OBAMA: It was a chance for me to say, on behalf of all Americans and people around the world, job well done.

RAY SUAREZ: Among them, operators from the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, often called "SEAL Team Six," and pilots from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, nicknamed "Night Stalkers."

Along with comrades from other so-called special missions units, like the Army's Delta Force, they work for the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. After the disastrous 1980 attempt to free hostages in Iran, JSOC was formed to use the top special forces units of the U.S. military and today is a vital tool in the American arsenal.

MARC AMBINDER, "National Journal": This wasn't the first time or fifth or 10th or 20th time that JSOC has -- has conducted secret ops in Pakistan without -- without the knowledge of the Pakistani government.

RAY SUAREZ: "National Journal"'s Marc Ambinder writes about intelligence and national security matters, and to the extent possible, JSOC.

MARC AMBINDER: Since 9/11, the units have turned into an army, a secret army within an army. They have incorporated intelligence elements, logistical elements, technological and development elements. And they really became the tip of the spear in the war against al-Qaida and the Taliban.

RAY SUAREZ: Since 9/11, JSOC has handled among the highest-profile and sensitive operations.

In 2003, JSOC operatives killed Saddam Hussein's sons and captured the Iraqi leader himself. In 2006, JSOC tracked down al-Qaida's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who was killed in a U.S. airstrike. And, in 2009, snipers from SEAL Team Six killed Somali pirates holding an American mariner off the Horn of Africa.

But JSOC's tactics in Iraq also led to revelations of detainee abuse and torture by American forces under the command of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who later led the war in Afghanistan.

Over the last decade of war in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, JSOC has quadrupled in size, from 1,000 to 4,000 personnel, as it's been asked to perform more and more tasks.

CIA Director Panetta said Tuesday on the NewsHour the high operational tempo gave policy-makers confidence they could do this job.

LEON PANETTA, CIA director: These teams conduct these kinds of operations two and three times a night in Afghanistan.

RAY SUAREZ: JSOC now works intimately with the CIA on both intelligence and operational matters. Though it operates in near-total secrecy, its missions are national security priorities.

And that has created a quandary, says Ambinder.

MARC AMBINDER: Let's be very clear what happened. The U.S. violated the sovereignty of a country to carry out a targeted assassination of someone. Now, 98 percent of us, including myself, think it was exactly the right thing to do -- right thing to do. But it absolutely has the potential to and probably should increase the public debate, or at least the public's knowledge, of this entity called JSOC.

RAY SUAREZ: For more on special operations and the SEALs, we turn to former SEAL Team Six member retired Navy Commander Ryan Zinke. He's now a Montana state senator. And former Army Special Forces officer retired Col. Kalev Sepp, he also served in civilian special operations posts in the Pentagon. He's now an assistant professor at the Navy Postgraduate School.

And, Senator, let me start with you. Just a short time ago, Vice President Biden called the units that pulled off this operation in Afghanistan some of the most capable fighting forces in the history of the world.

Who are they? How do you end up training, being picked for one of these units?

CMDR. RYAN ZINKE (RET.), U.S. Navy SEAL: What you are seeing is, is two tier-one forces, which really represent the best of the Navy and the Army.

On the SEAL side, it takes five years to -- in order to become -- when a young man says, I want to be a Navy SEAL, that process alone is a long and arduous journey. It represents about a 90 percent attrition rate. And then, when you're finally a member of a SEAL team, is that you will have a couple deployments under your belt, show you that are a superior performer, and then you are either asked or request an interview with SEAL Team Six, at which you go to another selection course, of which 50 percent fail.

So, really, when are you talking about the caliber of these individuals, both in dedication and skill level, it really represents the best of the best.

RAY SUAREZ: And by the time you become a member of that team, I guess you are no longer a real youngster either. How -- what is the average age in a unit like Team Six?

CMDR. RYAN ZINKE: Well, we used to call it the old man club. When I was active, it was -- we were about 34, 35 years of age on average.

But, you know, what you have to understand, too, is these guys have been fighting a war for over 10 years. They are hardened combat veterans. They have -- they have conducted operations in hundreds of compounds. And they are experienced. They know what they are doing. This is a routine operation and -- you know, for these guys anyway. They know what they are doing. They're pros.

RAY SUAREZ: Col. Sepp, what can these units do that conventionally trained forces can't or are not assigned to do?

COL. KALEV SEPP (RET.), U.S. Army: Well, Sen. Zinke answered part of that question in describing how they are selected for these missions.

There are simply operations, military operations, that are directed by the president that require a very high degree of assurance of success and to minimize risk -- there will always be risk -- by -- putting together people and teams that -- you know, that are physically powerful, highly intelligent, and then have a body of experience and maturity that attend to that, and then are connected to all the support systems, the aviation units that move them, the intelligence structures that -- that prepare the -- their understanding of their target for them.

These are truly national mission forces.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, let's -- I would like to get some more examples from both of you of the kinds of things that these men are taught to do that conventionally trained people just wouldn't learn in basic training, as generations of American service people have experienced.

Colonel?

COL. KALEV SEPP: The historical piece would be -- explain some of this.

The Son Tay raid into North Vietnam in 1970 -- that is the idea of being able to go deep into the -- you know, the heart of an enemy country right next to their capital and attempt a rescue of prisoners that are held at a prison camp is the -- is the modern model for the capabilities that a -- that these mission -- that these special mission units are supposed to be able to provide for the president.

RAY SUAREZ: Senator, some examples?

CMDR. RYAN ZINKE: When you look at weapons of mass destruction or hostage takeover, Achille Lauro, or any of those high-profile missions where you cannot fail, I think that this is the force. This is the force the president would call on.

They are constantly in training. They are war-hardened. They are a very expensive force to run as well. I mean, the resources that are brought to bear with these forces are -- are phenomenal.

And the other thing to understand is, is that for every one SEAL that was on the ground in the compound, there's 200 or 300 supporting cast members that are also doing the job, from intelligence collection, to bringing the fuel, loading the ammunition. I mean, these guys have a lot of great people behind them that are supporting the effort.

RAY SUAREZ: Senator, are you surprised at all that we're even having this conversation? In this week's "TIME" magazine, there is a quote to a report from a former SEAL, "I can't say a word about Team Six. There is no Team Six."

And, yet, here are you and I talking about it.

CMDR. RYAN ZINKE: Well, I was, quite frankly, shocked at the early confirmation by senior officials that used the term SEAL Team Six.

And in previous operations, it's been special operations. And, occasionally, you will break it down to Army Special Forces or Navy Special Forces. But I think this is the first time that we have had early confirmation of SEAL Team Six.

And, of course, when that happens is -- the public wants to know, who is SEAL Team Six? And, of course, Richard Marcinko in books, and then, pretty soon, with the technology available today, you are able to find, you know, Sen. Ryan Zinke in Whitefish, Mont., as a former member.

RAY SUAREZ: Colonel, do the JSOC units from the various branches of the services work together at all, or, under JSOC, do they remain very much Navy, Army, Marine, distinct units?

COL. KALEV SEPP: Oh, the strength of the Joint Special Operations Command is the -- is the cohesion that these units have in working with each other.

Elements of it tend to be pure only in the sense of where they are recruited from and formed. The -- there is an Army special mission unit. There is this Navy SEAL special mission unit. There is aviation units from the Army and Air Force.

But in the -- in the -- over the past 10 years, the duration and intensity and demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other locations around the world, in the counterterrorism missions that these special mission units have, have driven them to work together as a whole, as a complete team.

RAY SUAREZ: I'm glad you brought up the operational tempo, because it is reported that there is very high demand for the skills in -- that are embedded in JSOC.

We have a long tradition of civilian oversight of the military in this country. Is that weakened at all by a unit that seems a little bit beyond the reach of that civilian oversight?

COL. KALEV SEPP: The unit is under very direct control of the national executive authority of the United States.

It is -- they are -- although they maintain a very tight classification of, you know, the capabilities of the unit, who the membership are, what their tools and weapons and support capabilities are, in fact, they're -- they're under very tight review and control. And the evidence of that is the president's direct role in ordering this mission to capture or kill bin Laden inside Pakistan.

RAY SUAREZ: Sen. Zinke, same question.

CMDR. RYAN ZINKE: Well, I don't think so.

I think the technology is moving so rapidly forward. One is, you do need a force like this. And the demands on special operations forces have increased and will continue to increase. But when you look at the complexity of the operations that face these troops, I mean, it's no surprise that you do need years of experience.

And the fact that the president of the United States can look and observe on operations, you know, in foreign countries down to detail about almost a room-to-room clearance, well, you know, I think should give one pause, both that, A., you can command and control it from further away, and, B., that the level of scrutiny, I think, has never been more intense and more relevant and clear in operations that are being conducted.

RAY SUAREZ: Sen. Zinke, Col. Sepp, gentlemen, thank you both.

COL. KALEV SEPP: Thank you.

CMDR. RYAN ZINKE: Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Osama bin Laden's death at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs ignited debate about al-Qaeda's future as well as the future of militancy in Pakistan, where various outfits retain the capability to strike locally and globally. In the near term, analysts expect al-Qaeda Central's leaders in Pakistan will seek to ensure their security and execute a succession plan in the wake of bin Laden's capture, necessitating a communications lockdown and forestalling any direct retaliation. Instead, al-Qaeda Central is likely to rely on other outfits to respond on its behalf, either locally or globally. It already has called on fellow Muslims in Pakistan "to rise up and revolt to cleanse this shame that has been attached to them by a clique of traitors and thieves who sold everything to the enemies."[[BREAK]]

The threat of retaliation comes from a mélange of militants from various established outfits, splinter groups and independent networks. The internecine nature of this confederation also means that even if bin Laden's demise does provide space for a political resolution in Afghanistan, the threat from militants in Pakistan is unlikely to disappear. Despite understandable frustration, the United States must continue to engage with Pakistan. But the nature of that engagement should change, with a view toward the longer term, which means a greater focus on building civilian as opposed to military capacity. 

Taking Stock of the Major Players

The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has already promised retribution in Pakistan, which is understandable given that it has acted as a stalking horse for al-Qaeda in the past. Although the TTP has been on the front end of attacks in Pakistan, bin Laden's organization is believed to have been pulling some of the strings behind the scenes. Militants formerly associated with Punjabi outfits, such as Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), could contribute to a fresh round of attacks, as they have to previous operations in the past. These groups forged ties with al-Qaeda during the 1990s and some of their members began working with it to launch attacks in Pakistan soon after 9/11. Thus, at precisely the same time the army and ISI can expect additional (and deserved) pressure from the U.S. to stop playing favorites and crack down on all of the militants on Pakistani soil, the country may also be poised to witness a new wave of violence.

Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, maintains the most robust transnational networks of any Pakistani militant outfit and is viewed as an increasingly global threat. However, despite the fact that its above-ground wing Jamaat-ul-Dawa organized street demonstrations to mourn bin Laden, it is far from certain the group would be willing to launch an operation on behalf of al-Qaeda. The army and ISI are believed to be putting significant pressure on LeT's leaders to refrain from overtly engaging in attacks on Western interests abroad. Unless Pakistan wants a showdown with the United States this is unlikely to change. However, this also presumes a level of organizational coherence and control that may be at odds with the ground reality. LeT militants are present on both sides of the Durand Line, meaning not all of them rely on safe haven in Pakistan. Furthermore, individuals or factions within LeT can utilize its infrastructure as well as transnational capabilities to pursue their own operations without the leadership's consent. Enhanced organizational integration with other outfits heightens the opportunities for freelancing, with former LeT members acting as an important bridge to al-Qaeda as well as other militant outfits.

Al-Qaeda is not a significant military force in Afghanistan, and any organizational turmoil it experiences is unlikely to impact the start of the spring fighting season. Neither the Taliban nor the Haqqani Network, the two most prolific actors in the Afghan insurgency, has embraced out-of-area attacks or operations in Pakistan, though the latter has supported actors that do. The bigger question is how bin Laden's demise will impact their respective Pakistan-based leaderships.

The army and Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) are unlikely to end their support for either entity, both of which are considered essential to protecting Pakistan's interests in Afghanistan. However, America's ability to unilaterally strike bin Laden's compound in the heart of Pakistan provides it leverage, in part because the operation raised questions about the ability of the army and ISI to protect senior leaders in the Taliban and Haqqani Network. More importantly, although al-Qaeda's connection to both of those entities goes deeper than just bin Laden's history with either outfit, that personal relationship was an important one. Osama's demise creates space for a political reconciliation in Afghanistan, in the event the U.S. chooses to pursue such a path. Problematically, there is no guarantee the army and ISI could, or would attempt to, dismantle the militant infrastructure in its entirety even if Afghanistan is settled according to Pakistan's interests.

The Protean Militant Milieu

Historically, there were three loci in which militants in Pakistan were active: Afghanistan, Indian-administered Kashmir and sectarianism attacks at home. Two new areas of activity have emerged during the past several years: a revolutionary locus manifested by the insurgency against Pakistan, and a global locus characterized by out of area attacks against America and its allies. Sectarian attacks continue, and have become a means of destabilizing the state. The Kashmir jihad has stagnated, though LeT remains committed to that cause and to attacks against India. Afghanistan, on the other hand, has become a focal point for every major militant outfit as well as a host of smaller networks and splinter groups.

Regardless of official army and ISI policy vis-à-vis militants on its soil, any political settlement in Afghanistan is likely to have positive and negative ramifications at the ground level. With the Kashmir jihad moribund, the abatement of the Afghan insurgency would mark the first time in decades that Pakistani militants were not faced with active open fronts on which to fight. A solution deemed acceptable by the Taliban would provide an impetus for many militants to demobilize and would rob jihadist leaders of a valuable rallying cry. However, those unwilling to lay down their arms could drift further into the sectarian, revolutionary or global orbits. Furthermore, whereas the Taliban might be willing to break ties with al-Qaeda, other actors might not. At this point the country is host to a consortium of established outfits, splinters, networks and freelance operators whose most enduring feature is its protean nature. These actors will continue to pose a threat to Pakistan, its neighbors and the West until the entire militant edifice is torn down.

Too Big To Fail

The response in Pakistan has not been promising. By focusing on the raid into Pakistani territory and glossing over the fact that bin Laden was living on Pakistani soil, the army appears to be doubling down on obstinacy. Nor is it helpful that the government says it will refuse the U.S. access to those who survived the raid. The one glimmer of hope thus far was the statement earlier this week by the Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, that the government would launch an investigation into how bin Laden managed to live for so long in Abbotobad and whether his support system included any serving officials. It now appears the military has taken charge of the investigation, which does not bode well for transparency. None of this is particularly surprising; even after being humbled by the U.S. raid the army remains the most powerful institution in the country, and regardless of what misgivings they may have, those in the civilian government have a history of circling the wagons in times like this.

Despite all of this, the United States must continue to engage Pakistan: first, because the Pakistani populace should not be punished for the behavior of its military leadership; second, because the United States cannot degrade the militant threat emanating from Pakistan on its own; third, because doing so would help to disprove the narrative in Pakistan that American will abandon it after objectives vis-à-vis al-Qaeda are achieved; and fourth, because Pakistani stability is necessary for greater stability in South Asia, a region in which the United States will continue to have equities for a long time to come.

The question is, who should the United States engage and assist? While recognizing the contributions and sacrifices the Pakistani military has made in the struggle against some militant outfits, it should also be apparent by now that relying so heavily on the military is not a recipe for long-term stability in a militant-free Pakistan. Instead, the U.S. should focus more attention on capacity building for civilian intelligence agencies and law enforcement, which are precisely the institutions that should be on the front lines of counter-terrorism in Pakistan.

This must be part of a wider realignment of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship and one that sees greater emphasis given to building up civilian institutions in Pakistan. For too long the United States has relied on the army as its primary interlocutor out of perceived operational necessity, often with frustrating results. The military-to-military relationship is an important one, but over-reliance on the army is at odds with the aim of fostering civilian governance in Pakistan. The United States finds itself with additional leverage this week, and should use some of it to promote that cause. Doing so is in keeping not only with American interests, but also American values.

Stephen Tankel is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of the forthcoming book, "Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba."

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. — Brimming with pride, President Obama on Friday met and honored the U.S. commandos he sent after terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, saluting them on behalf of America and the world and capping an extraordinary week for the country. “Job well done,” the President declared.Mr. Obama addressed roughly 2,000 troops after meeting privately with the full assault team — Army helicopter pilots and Navy SEAL commandos — who executed the dangerous raid on bin Laden’s compound and killed the al-Qaida leader in Pakistan early Monday. Their identities are kept secret.Speaking to a sweltering hangar full of cheering soldiers, Mr. Obama said: “The terrorist leader that struck our nation on 9/11 will never threaten America again.”Al-Qaeda will be defeated, he promised from this Army post, whose troops have sustained heavy losses in an Afghanistan war that has grown on his watch.Fresh warnings emerged, though, underscoring Mr. Obama’s caution that the fight against terrorists still rages.The Afghan Taliban said the death of bin Laden would only boost morale of insurgents battling the United States and its NATO allies. Al-Qaeda itself vowed revenged, confirming bin Laden’s death for the first time but saying that Americans’ “happiness will turn to sadness.”Soldiers at Fort Campbell were careful not to celebrate bin Laden’s death, voicing instead a sense of professional pride for the work of the commandos.“We’re not done,” said Major Luis Ortiz, who was at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan when Mr. Obama visited the troops there last December. “We cut off the head of the snake, but the snake is still wiggling around.”Mr. Obama called the bin Laden raid one of the most successful intelligence and military operations in America’s history, and said he had to come to extend personal thanks. Vice President Joe Biden joined Mr. Obama in a briefing with the mission members and then emerged to put it bluntly: “We just got to spend time with the assaulters who got bin Laden.”Defense Secretary Robert Gates met with members of the bin Laden mission team a day earlier to express his admiration and appreciation, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said.Mr. Obama’s appearance at Fort Campbell culminated a week-long response to the demise of the long-hunted al-Qaeda leader, from the White House to Ground Zero in New York to Fort Campbell, home of the famous 101st Airborne Division. The division has been integral to Mr. Obama’s war plan in Afghanistan, and many of its combat teams have returned recently from tours of duty.The week gave a political and emotional lift to the president; in turn, he called for the unity that has eluded him in divisive Washington for most of his term.“This week has been a reminder of what we’re about as a people,” the President said. “The essence of America, the values that have defined us for more than 200 years, they don’t just endure — they’re stronger than ever.”With his comments here, Mr. Obama offered a counterpoint to a growing cry within his party and even among some Republicans that the time has come to withdraw from Afghanistan. Mr. Obama will start drawing troops home as promised this summer but has signaled no change in mission.The day also illustrated Mr. Obama’s governing life as it has been and as it is likely to be going ahead.A favorable jobs report still showed the challenges he faces sustaining an economic recovery. And his address at an Indianapolis transmission plant — before he flew to Fort Campbell — aimed to promote his energy policy just as high gas prices, as the pPesident put it to workers, “have been eating away at your paychecks.”At Fort Campbell, the President and Vice President first met with the men who raided the compound itself, probably including those who killed bin Laden.Mr. Obama was then briefed on how the operation was carried out, by those who coordinated the attack from command centers in Afghanistan, and in other undisclosed parts of the region.That team was headed by Vice Admiral William McRaven, a Navy SEAL himself and head of the military’s elite counterterrorism unit, the Joint Special Operations Command.Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden then met with the entire SEAL team unit that carried out the raid — both the two dozen troops who stormed the compound, and roughly the same number who circled above as backup, in case the SEALs on the ground met overwhelming force.The President also met with the air crews from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known as the Night Stalkers, who flew the SEALs to the mission, as well as Green Berets from the 5th Special Forces Group.It’s not known whether the Green Berets were involved in the bin Laden mission, but the 5th Special Forces Group gave rise to the Horse Soldiers, who first invaded Afghanistan right after 9/11.The President awarded the units involved in the raid a Presidential Unit Citation — the highest such honor that can be given to a unit — in recognition of their extraordinary service and achievement.

[image]     The Indianapolis Colts, WISH-TV and The Salvation Army are teaming up to help those whose lives have been impacted by the devastating storms that recently ripped through the Southeast United States. Our “Hoosiers Sending Help South” campaign, which runs May 5 through May 8, is a call to action for Hoosiers to step up in a big way and help our neighbors in the south. All money raised during this four day initiative will bring food, water, shelter, and other essential support to the victims. Colts Owner and CEO Jim Irsay is kicking things off with a $5,000 donation. With your help, we can make an even bigger impact. Text “GIVE” to 80888 to make a $10 donation.  You can also click on the following link below to donate any amount:  https://secure20.salvationarmy.org/?projectId=USC-IND-ColtsHelp   Remember, 100% of every dollar will go to those who need it most.  [image] I challenge you to "Make a Difference" in the lives of those devastated by the unprecedented tornado outbreak across the southern tier of states !!  Join me & other Colts fans by making a donation and "make a difference" !! DEADLINE IS SUNDAY MAY 8TH !!! 

The Colts, WISH-TV and The Salvation Army are teaming up to help those whose lives have been impacted by the devastating storms that recently ripped through the Southeast United States. Our “Hoosiers Sending Help South” campaign, which runs May 5 through May 8, is a call to action for Hoosiers to step up in a [...]

The death of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief Baitullah Mehsud in a U.S. drone strike in August of 2009 touched off a heated debate about the future of the militant outfit and its succession. Many believed Mehsud's death was a fatal blow to the TTP, and they have proven correct partially, if not fully. Soon after Mehsud's death, cracks emerged in the TTP's leadership, weakening the group's umbrella organization, which was once seen a mounting wave likely to engulf major parts of Pakistan.

Now that the United States has gotten rid of its Enemy No. 1 and founder of al-Qaeda after almost 10 years, a similar debate is raging about the future of the group that has spread its tentacles to different parts of the world and influenced countless individuals with its jihadist propaganda.

Osama bin Laden's death, in an audacious and stunning commando raid by U.S. SEALs in Pakistan's Abbottabad cantonment, is no doubt a hard blow to al-Qaeda. But it also carries adverse consequences for its TTP affiliate. The TTP's leadership is already underground, partly because of major military actions by Pakistani security forces in areas like Swat, Mohmand, and Waziristan, and partly because of the increasing number of drone strikes in the tribal areas over the past year. In a situation where the TTP was already in disarray, the killing of bin Laden, the hero of all militant groups and particularly their footsoldiers and new recruits, will prove disastrous for their morale.[[BREAK]]

Operations in Swat and South Waziristan have almost dismantled the organizational structure of the TTP, which has continuously attacked the Pakistani state, and whose leaders include Maulana Fazlullah and Hakimullah Mehsud. Both of them were, on one hand, a source of inspiration and courage for their fighters, but served as a symbol of dread for those opposed to their agendas.

The Taliban in Bajaur under the leadership of Maulvi Faqir Muhammad have already adopted a notable silence over the past year, keeping a distance from the TTP and other groups, while those fighters in neighboring Mohmand are already in hiding in the remote areas bordering eastern Afghanistan.

The Khyber-based Lashkar-e-Islam (LI) of Mangal Bagh, one of the feared militant outfits that operated just a few kilometers from Peshawar less than two years ago, has also retreated into the remote and mountainous Tirah Valley and engaged in a war with its staunch opponent, Ansar-ul Islam. Reports over recent weeks suggest that the locals from Zakhakhel tribe, once the host of LI, are now up in arms against the group and both sides are taking casualties on daily basis.

In spite of this chaos across the tribal areas, in the short run the TTP can unleash a campaign of attacks on soft targets to take their revenge for bin Laden's death, as well as to try to tell the world that they remain a serious threat. A similar bombing campaign from local Taliban fighters occurred in Peshawar and other parts of Pakistan following Pakistani military operations in Swat and South Waziristan in 2009.

In the longer run, however, Taliban footsoldiers are likely to loose faith in the group's power and come to believe that no place is safe for a terrorist, whatever his stature and position. The continuous failure of U.S. forces to locate and capture people like Osama bin Laden had been a source of courage and inspiration for those eager to join the ranks of the Taliban, and now that he's gone, some may be discouraged from joining the jihad.

Recently, the killing of Taliban godfather Colonel Imam by Hakimullah Mehsud's fighters, and continuous violations of the Kurram peace accord, which was negotiated by the Haqqani network, shows further divisions among the militant groups that operated under the umbrella of the TTP. The death of Colonel Imam, who was kidnapped and then held in captivity for months, highlighted growing divisions between Hakimullah Mehsud and the Haqqani network. By the same token, the Kurram peace accord was signed with the covert support of the Haqqani network to get the goodwill of the Shia Muslims living in upper Kurram close the Afghan border. However, local Taliban fighters have continued attacking the Shia, proving that they are not on the same page with the Haqqanis and even with their TTP leadership, which is drawing money from the Haqqanis and providing them local support.

The only groups under the Pakistani Taliban heading that are holding strong are those led by Hafiz Gul Bahadar and Maulvi Nazir in Waziristan, where Pakistani security forces are hesitating to launch an operation against them despite pressure from the U.S. Although these groups have suffered losses as a result of the drone strikes, their leadership structures are intact and their chiefs remain in close contact with the Haqqani network and al-Qaeda members.

However, the discovery of bin Laden so far inside Pakistan will further increase pressure from the U.S. on the Pakistani government to launch a serious military operation in North Waziristan, believed to be the hideout of Haqqani network. As the U.S. plans its Afghan withdrawal and NATO countries seem to be in a hurry to conclude the war, their pressure on Pakistan, particularly after bin Laden was killed so close to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, is quite understandable. Therefore, any Taliban sympathizers in the Pakistani Army and security agencies will find themselves on slippery grounds in continuing to refuse to take decisive action against the three groups that have traditionally been considered ‘good' Taliban -- the Haqqani network, Hafiz Gul Bahadar, and Maulvi Nazir.

The talks about talks with the Afghan Taliban are also a source of concern for the TTP's leadership. Most of the Pakistani Taliban fighters consider their Afghan counterpart as a source of motivation and their fugitive chief Mullah Muhammad Omar as their leader. However, if the Afghan Taliban are actually considering talks with the Afghan government, the Pakistani Taliban will be left without an inspirational leader. 

Pakistan's religious parties, who used to avoid condemning Taliban violence in Pakistan, have also adopted a meaningful silence over bin Laden's death. No one is coming forward to criticize al-Qaeda, even for political point scoring, although several have organized protests against the U.S. raid in Abbottabad.

After years of not condemning Taliban attacks in Pakistan, the leadership of the Islamist parties may be rethinking their stances. Attacks on civilians and the leadership of those parties have provided enough food for thought for those parties to think that they are playing with fire, as demonstrated by two attacks on the pro-Taliban leader of the JUI-F, Maulana Fazlur Rehman. A Jamaat-e-Islami party rally was also attacked in Peshawar and several of its workers were killed and injured.

The JUI-F and JI's silence may be pragmatic. When I recently asked one JI leader why they don't oppose the Taliban and their violence in Pakistan, he told me, "We have no option but to stay silent. We are running schools, welfare organizations, and having our public meetings. Do you think we can continue all this if we come out in open against the Taliban?"

The JI's strident anti-Americanism is another issue, but this comment suggests Pakistan's Islamist politicians are making a covert compromise with the Taliban groups. Their leaders privately disagree with the agenda of the Pakistani Taliban, although they support the Afghan Taliban. The disenchantment of Pakistan's religious political parties with bin Laden and with the Pakistani Taliban is yet another blow to the TTP's morale.

Although the TTP and its allies are not likely to collapse immediately following the death of bin Laden, the Pakistani public and politicians' growing disenchantment with the TTP and its agenda, the organizational struggles of the various Taliban groups in the tribal areas, and increased pressure on Pakistan's security forces to go after militants in Waziristan suggests that the 'Talibanization' of Pakistan may, at last, be receding.

Daud Khattak is a Pashtun journalist currently working for the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Pashto-language station Radio Mashaal.

by Marian Wang

More details, debates, and even doubts have continued to emerge about the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden this week.

We've been tracking the coverage with our reading guide. We're also got a weekend wrap-up for the major threads of this evolving story.

For the doubters (aka the Deathers)

In an online message that surfaced today, Al Qaeda  confirmed that its founder was killed and warned that his death would not be in vain: “We will remain, God willing, a curse chasing the Americans and their agents, following them outside and inside their countries.” U.S. analysts have yet to verify the authenticity of the message. 

The White House has announced it won’t be releasing photos of bin Laden’s body, citing the images’ potential to incite violence or to be used as propaganda. At least one watchdog group has put in filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the federal government and has said it’s prepared to sue for the photos.

Reuters, meanwhile, has bought several grisly photos of three of the other men who died in the raid at the compound. Beware: they’re bloody.

For those tracking the United States’ changing story of the raid—and questioning its legality

The White House didn’t offer any more updates on its narrative of the raid, though a piece in today’s Washington Post hashes out some details on how bin Laden was shot:

U.S. officials provided new details on bin Laden’s final moments, saying the al-Qaeda leader was first spotted by U.S. forces in the doorway of his room on the compound’s third floor. Bin Laden then turned and retreated into the room before being shot twice — in the head and in the chest. U.S. commandos later found an AK-47 and a pistol in the room.

“He was retreating,” a move that was regarded as resistance, a U.S. official briefed on the operation said. “You don’t know why he’s retreating, what he’s doing when he goes back in there. Is he getting a weapon? Does he have a [suicide] vest?”

The details are important for those still scrutinizing the mission’s legality. U.S. officials have maintained that the raid was legal, arguing that lethal force was authorized regardless of whether bin Laden was armed. 

The Post story also highlighted the role of the CIA, which had for months been monitoring the Abbottabad compound from a safe house in the city:

The effort was so extensive and costly that the CIA went to Congress in December to secure authority to reallocate tens of millions of dollars within assorted agency budgets to fund it, U.S. officials said.

Most of that surveillance capability remained in place until the execution of the raid by U.S. Navy SEALs shortly after 1 a.m. in Pakistan. The agency’s safe house did not play a role in the raid and has since been shut down, in part because of concerns about the safety of CIA assets in the aftermath, but also because the agency’s work was considered finished.

The CIA is still going through the material taken from the compound. Early reports indicate that Al Qaeda was considering plans to attack the U.S. by tampering with trains.

For those still wondering about Pakistan

As we noted yesterday, tensions between the U.S. and Pakistan have grown since news of the raid first broke on Sunday night, with the initial congratulations giving way to sharp criticisms from both Pakistan's foreign ministry and army. Here’s what we wrote yesterday:

Comments from Pakistani agencies and officials have ranged from congratulations on a "great victory" to denunciation of a "cold-blooded" killing by the United States.

… The Pakistani Foreign Ministry criticized the U.S. operation as an “unauthorized unilateral action” and warned the U.S. and other countries against taking it as precedent.

Pakistan’s top army official also responded yesterday, calling the raid a violation of the sovereignty of Pakistan and warning that in the future such actions would “warrant a review on the level of military/intelligence cooperation with the United States.”

Pakistan has continually denied knowledge of bin Laden’s whereabouts but maintained that it helped provide intelligence that led to bin Laden.

In an interview with NPR, former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf acknowledged that bin Laden’s presence could only lead to one of two conclusions—Pakistan’s intelligence agencies either were complicit or incompetent. “I strongly believe in the later,” Mushrraf said. “I cannot imagine there was complicity.”

For the torture debaters

For those who believe that torture is simply wrong, there’s no debate here.

But for others, there’s a lot to still puzzle over. Many proponents of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” are still trying to make a case for why these techniques—banned by the Obama administration but approved under Bush—were useful and shouldn’t be ruled out in the future.

Several U.S. military interrogators released a statement on Wednesday pushing back against claims that torture was necessary to obtain the intelligence leading to bin laden. From the Christian Science Monitor:

“We are concerned about the suggestion by some that the use of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques led US forces to Osama bin Laden’s compound,” reads the statement, signed by four former military and FBI interrogators.

That hasn’t stopped torture defenders from continuing to make the argument. In an opinion column published today, former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey argued that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques.” Others have pointed out that KSM in fact misled interrogators when asked about bin Laden’s courier, according to official accounts of the intelligence trail.

Who knew that a vaccine was possible for the defense against HIV and AIDS? Well the scientists at the University of Maryland (Turtles) have been working on one for decades and now the school has been granted millions of dollars in grants from the Gates' Foundation and the United States Army to keep pushing for a solution to one of the world's most deadly mutating diseases. Scientists have long been frustrated by the AIDS virus' ability to mutate. The virus constantly changes the makeup of the proteins on its surface, making it hard for antibodies to attack the disease...

 

Click: all of the AfPak Channel's coverage of the death of Osama bin Laden (FP).

Targeting trains

American intelligence analysts have reportedly discovered, based on documents and information recovered from Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that the slain al-Qaeda leader remained involved with planning attacks against the United States, rather than acting only as an inspirational figurehead in recent years (NYT, Post, Guardian, WSJ, BBC, CNN, Tel, Times, AFP). Handwritten notes from February of 2010 indicated that al-Qaeda was considering an attack timed to the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 strikes on New York and Washington that involved targeting railroads in the U.S., though officials said there was no evidence that the plot was more than "aspirational." [[BREAK]]

The C.I.A. reportedly maintained a safe house in Abbottabad, a military garrison town a few hours' drive from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, for months before the May 2 raid, and developed an extensive network of local informants and other sources (Post, NYT, Reuters). The New York Times reports that the last time U.S. forces thought they had bin Laden in their sights was in 2007 near Tora Bora, Afghanistan (NYT).

Today, U.S. president Barack Obama is planning to meet with some members of the Navy SEAL team that carried out the raid, which involved secret, radar-evading helicopters (CBS, CNN, NYT). Since 2009, the U.S. has been secretly increasing the ranks of "hunter-killer commandos" in Afghanistan, and used this increase to "try to pressure the Pakistanis themselves to move against militants" (WSJ). For more on the legal aspects of the bin Laden raid, read our sister newsletter, the Legal War on Terror (FP).

Al-Qaeda has just released its first confirmation of bin Laden's death in a statement posted on militant websites dated May 3, saying that his blood "will not be wasted" (Reuters, AP). Pakistani officials tell the Wall Street Journal that bin Laden split from his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, around six years ago, because bin Laden reportedly had money troubles and was losing popularity in the network, though U.S. officials say they had not heard of a split (WSJ). U.S. officials did say they had strong evidence that the funding for the al-Qaeda leader had been an issue.

Five years in the same room

One of the three wives of bin Laden has reportedly told Pakistani intelligence, which is carefully managing a "a steady drip of testimony" from the women and children in their custody, that she had lived in the same room in the Abbottabad compound with bin Laden for five or six years (Guardian, McClatchy, WSJ, Guardian, AP, CNN, BBC, ABC). Pakistani authorities say they will not allow the U.S. automatic access to the survivors, who are believed to be held in at a medical facility in Rawalpindi (ET, ET). Pakistan's foreign ministry has said the women and children would be returned to their countries of origin, though since Saudi Arabia revoked bin Laden's citizenship in 1994, his relatives in the country would have to adopt the children. Maulana Abdul Aziz, the head of the radical Red Mosque in Islamabad, has reportedly offered to adopt bin Laden's children (Toronto Star).

The Pakistani Army speaks

In the first public reaction from the Pakistani Army to the U.S. raid that killed bin Laden, Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani warned that a repeat of the operation would not be tolerated and would lead to a review of Pakistan's "level of military/intelligence cooperation with the United States" (NYT, Post, Dawn, Geo, ET/Reuters, AP, WSJ, AJE, FT, FT, Guardian, Dawn). A press release from the Pakistani Army, available here, also strongly warned neighboring India against conducting similar operations, and stated that Pakistan's "strategic assets" -- nuclear weapons -- are well-defended. Gen. Kayani also reportedly decided that U.S. personnel in Pakistan -- around 275 at any given time -- should be reduced to the "absolute minimum" (NYT, DT).

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen, who reportedly told Gen. Kayani about the Abbottabad raid around 3am local time on Monday morning, said via a spokesman that he had not been informed of any decisions by Pakistan about the presence of U.S. military trainers there (DT, AFP). Top Pentagon official Michele Flournoy said the Obama administration does not have "any definitive evidence" that Pakistan knew bin Laden was living in Abbottabad, which a new poll shows 72 percent of Americans disagree with (NYT, CSM).

Members of the U.S. Congress are calling for a complete review of the U.S.'s some $3 billion in annual aid to Pakistan, after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on March 18 certified that Pakistan was making a "sustained commitment" to ending support for Islamist militants, a key condition for the provision of aid (CNN, McClatchy). Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari has "ordered a full court press" from Pakistan's lobby in Washington to counter allegations that Pakistan knew bin Laden was in Abbottabad or helped shelter him (Reuters). Some 1,000 people near Abbottabad protested against the U.S. raid, and in Quetta, the Islamist political party the JUI-F organized a rally to "pay homage" to bin Laden (AFP, AFP). Protests also occurred in Multan and Peshawar.

Maj. Gen. Richard Mills, a top U.S. commander who recently finished a tour in southern Afghanistan, said that Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, "should be worried" following the raid on bin Laden's compound because "it shows the Americans are focused" (AFP, Reuters). The Post assesses that legislators seeking to use bin Laden's death to renew calls to speed up the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan are unlikely to succeed because they "still lack the support of either party's leadership" and "still do not have an urgent piece of legislation -- a bill central to the war effort -- to force a distracted Congress to focus on Afghanistan" (Post).
 
Non-bin Laden news

In the first suspected U.S. drone strike reported since April 22, missiles killed as many as 15 people, including foreign militants and one civilian, in the Datta Khel area of North Waziristan (AFP, AP, ET/Reuters, AP, Geo, Post, CNN, The News). Clashes between militants and Pakistani security forces continue in Mohmand, and in Dera Ismail Khan, Pakistani police killed two would-be suicide bombers after their car refused to stop a checkpoint (DT, ET). In Quetta, unknown gunmen opened fire on around 50 people exercising on a soccer field, killing six (AP).

The NYT reports that yesterday's rally in Kabul against the Karzai government's reconciliation efforts toward the Taliban attracted more than 10,000 people, mostly from northern Afghanistan (NYT).

New uniforms

Although the Badminton World Federation has ruled that skirts are part of badminton's official attire, women of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in northwest Pakistan are taking to the courts wearing hijabs and with covered legs (ET). The FATA Sports Board has organized a tournament for May 16.

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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A suspected CIA drone strike targeted a hotel Thursday in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan’s borderlands, killing eight people, according to Pakistani news reports.  

 A series of missiles pounded the town of Datta Khel, near what U.S. officials believe is the headquarters of the Haqqani network, an Afghan insurgent force that has staged deadly bombings in Afghan cities and regularly attacks NATO troops in eastern Afghanistan.

CIA drone strikes in the past year frequently have struck North Waziristan, a stewpot of Islamist militant groups that the United States has long pressured Pakistan’s army to cleanse.  

Read full article >>

In 2003, when the British government first decided it wanted to teach emotional well-being to the nation’s youth, it decided that each British school had a statutory responsibility to turn children into SHEEP. The acronym stood for ‘Safe, Healthy, Enjoying life, Economic well-being and Positive contribution’ - well-intentioned stuff, but the acronym unfortunately suggested that the Department for Education wanted to raise a nation of docile conformists. 

And, in fact, one of the principal dangers of the entire ‘well-being movement’ or ‘happiness agenda’ is this: it could lead to adults and children being spoon-fed advice on how to live, without being given the means to challenge that advice, and hold it to account. When managed this way, then the ‘happiness agenda’ really is creating sheep, rather than rational, autonomous and empowered citizens.

The main problem is that the ‘happiness agenda’ is being presented as an objective science, rather than a moral philosophy. This is particularly the case with Martin Seligman’s Positive Psychology, which informs Richard Layard’s Action for Happiness, and which is now being taught to every soldier in the US Army. It’s also being piloted in 60 British schools, and may eventually be introduced it into the British national curriculum, to replace the increasingly discredited Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL).

Positive Psychology purports to teach people how to ‘flourish’. It teaches a model of the Good Life, and uses government policy to disseminate this model. Now, until recently, it was assumed that the role of liberal governments is to secure our negative freedom from war, crime, disease, want and so on, while leaving people free to pursue their own good in their own way. Governments should protect our inalienable right to pursue happiness, but how we pursue it is up to us. It was previously seen as dangerous, or even illegal, for governments to go any further and promote a particular model of the Good Life, because that would overstep our religious freedom, our freedom to decide what we and our children believe about life, the universe and everything.

This has changed in the last decade, thanks to the growth of ‘happiness science’, which claims to have experimentally discovered what ways of living really lead to well-being and happiness. Scientists like Martin Seligman insist that what they are producing is not moral philosophy. It is science - descriptive, not prescriptive. Therefore, if governments promote it in schools, or armies, or prisons, or anywhere else, they are not really telling their citizens how to think, how to live, or what to believe. They are merely passing on the evidence-based skills and techniques needed to thrive. The language is one of skills, means and technologies, rather than moral values.

It is hoped that, through this neat manoeuvre, the state can finally go beyond a limited nightwatchman function, and provide the people with some form of moral guidance, to help them learn how to control their minds and bodies, to overcome all the problems of western society - depression, anxiety, drug abuse, food disorders, smoking, stress, insomnia, obesity, underage sex and drinking, bullying, loneliness - all those emotional and behavioural problems that emerge from our apparent ignorance of how to live, and how to govern ourselves.

Now there is a lot to welcome in this initiative. I happen to believe there are certain ‘techniques’ which one can use to learn how to govern yourself and live a happier life. Many of them come from ancient philosophies - from Stoicism, or Buddhism, or Yoga - but you can test them out, and build up an evidence base to show they work. So a lot of the new happiness science actually draws on ancient wisdom, and re-connects us to it. 

However, there’s a limit to the extent to which one can ‘prove’ what is the right way to live, and what the Good Life consist of. There is also a limit to what government technocrats, civil servants and teachers can roll out to the people as ‘objective science’. Most of the evidence for the science of happiness comes from happiness questionnaires, which ask you simply to rate how you are feeling, on a scale of one to seven. So, in order to test a happiness intervention, researchers will simply ask you how you feel before doing an intervention, and how you feel after doing it. If you feel better after doing it, presto, another happiness technique has been discovered, and we’re one step further towards a perfect model of the Good Life.

The problem is, there is a moral assumption behind the objective science. It is a Utilitarian or Epicurean assumption: that the aim of life is simply feeling good, and that the test of the worth of an action is simply how many good feelings it creates. That’s what Epicurus believed, it’s what Jeremy Bentham believed, it’s what Lord Richard Layard believes, but it’s certainly not what everyone believes. In fact, I’d say a majority of people believe there’s more to life than simply good feelings. Many might agree with Aristotle that some things, like virtue, achievement, knowledge or civic duty, are good in themselves. They might make you feel good too, but the good feelings are a bonus, rather than an end in themselves. Others might agree with the Stoics that the Good Life doesn’t just mean focusing on the positive. It also means being able to face the worst that life can throw at you, and still carry on.

Within the well-being movement, in fact, there is a high level debate between two broad camps - the Aristotelians and the Utilitarians - over the definition of well-being. The Aristotelians, who include some government ministers, define well-being as eudaimonia, which means not simply feeling good, but living a life of optimal human functioning, meaning and virtue. Martin Seligman also considers himself more an Aristotelian, as opposed to a hedonist or Utilitarian.

An Aristotelian approach to life sounds great - but it’s quite hard to turn into an objective science. Can you measure the extent to which a person’s life is eudaimonic? Can you scientifically measure how meaningful a person’s life is, how full of spiritual significance? It sounds ridiculous, but in fact, Martin Seligman’s resilience training course for the US Army claims to be able to measure soldiers’ ‘spiritual fitness’ using a simple questionnaire. It asks them a handful of questions such as ‘to what extent do you think your life is connected to a higher meaning’, and if they score too low, it recommends they read the ‘appropriate self-development modules’. Unsurprisingly, soldiers have been offended by this automatic spiritual counseling, and some have even threatened to sue the Army. It offers a simplistic technocratic solution to a deeply personal spiritual question.

At the moment, I worry that there is a pyramid-like structure in the well-being movement. At the top of the pyramid, experts debate the philosophical ideas of well-being: how can one define it, can one measure it objectively, what moral assumptions are we making, what philosophers have come up with the best answers in the past? At the bottom of the pyramid, however, all this debate is covered up, and the masses are simply presented the evidence as ‘facts’.

This is especially true in well-being classes in schools - all the debate and contention is left out, and one is left with Wellington College’s ’10 steps for a happy life’, which is “what every child and adult needs to follow in order to live a happy life”, as headmaster Anthony Seldon puts it. Personally, I don’t want my children to be taught how to be Utilitarians. That was tried in the 19th century, and the unfortunate pupil who received this Utilitarian education, John Stuart Mill, ended up having a nervous breakdown at the end of it.

It seems to me that, if the well-being movement is not to become another ossified and hierarchical church, then ordinary people need to be included in the debates going on at the top of policy circles over what exactly well-being is. They need to be educated and empowered to consider the different philosophical approaches to the Good Life. They also need to learn about the history of these different approaches, and the areas of disagreement and debate. Otherwise, they are not being treated as equals, but as sheep. 

So what would a more democratic approach to teaching well-being mean, practically? 

1)  You need to be open about your moral assumptions, and the fact that those assumptions are debatable. If you’re teaching a Utilitarian approach to well-being, you need to be up front about that. Let people know that alternate views are possible, that not everyone thinks the meaning of life is to feel as much happiness as possible.

2)  Encourage debate, and train people how to debate. You don’t want well-being teachers who get terrified every time a child (or adult) challenges their philosophical principles. On the contrary, you need a teacher who is comfortable with debate, and who can show their students how to debate, in an open-ended and open-minded way.

3)  Be open about where your ideas and techniques come from, and their history. Some CBT therapists and Positive Psychologists are frighteningly unaware that their theory’s roots are in ancient philosophy. Give people at least some awareness of the original contexts and source material, and make these sources as available as possible to people. In adult well-being classes, the original material should be taught and discussed more directly.

4)  Well-being classes shouldn’t just be for schools and universities. People should have access to them all through life. The government should help set up a network of philosophy clubs, which allow people to come together and debate the Good Life. There should also be a website which gives people the classics of philosophy and spirituality free to download, which provides the latest information, news and essays on well-being, while also allowing people to upload their own stories, videos and findings from their own experiments.

5)  Academia also has an important role to play. In particular, the government should encourage the development of well-being institutes, which bring together leaders in neuroscience, psychology, philosophy and theology, and encourage cross-disciplinary conferences and debates, the proceedings of which should be publicly accessible via YouTube. At the moment, these disciplines aren’t really talking to each other, which is to the detriment of the well-being movement - they have much to learn from each other. 

6)  Finally, you need to teach a plural approach to teaching well-being. You can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach, as Action for Happiness does. I would suggest teaching adults about the Epicurean, Stoic-Aristotelian, Taoist, Buddhist, Marxist and Monotheistic approaches to the Good Life.  What do these traditions say about the question of how to live well? Where do they agree, and where do they differ?

The art of living and governing yourself is not easy to teach well. I think it might actually be the hardest subject to teach, in that it requires real intelligence, humour, flexibility and compassion. But it could also be the most rewarding subject to teach and to learn. The goal, it seems to me, is not to train young people to unquestioningly accept the principles of Utilitarianism, or Aristotelianism, or Marxism, or any other ism, but instead to prepare them to be autonomous and resilient citizens who can think for themselves. You can’t do that via automated questionnaires with a limited set of responses, because their responses might be something very intelligent that we haven’t thought of yet.   

KHOU (blog) - The committee includes representatives from the Japanese Ministry of Environment, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA): APHIS Animal Care and Wildlife Services, United States Army Veterinary Corps, veterinary and toxicology experts, ... http://www.khou.com/community/blogs/animal-attraction/Animal-Attraction--120949354.html...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi were among the thousands of people who paid their last respects today to late Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Dorjee Khandu, who was killed in a helicopter crash on Saturday with four others.

Dr Singh and Ms Gandhi touched down at the helipad in the Raj Bhawan campus here at about 1030 hours, accompanied by Union Home Minister P Chidambaram.

They drove down to the chief minister's official residence and paid their last respects to the departed leader.

The Central leaders also met the family of late Khandu and extended their condolences to them before flying back.

Khandu's body is now being flown to Tawang by an Indian Air Force (IAF) helicopter, where his last rites will be performed at his native village as per Buddhist rituals. A state funeral will be accorded to the late chief minister.

The state government has announced a three-day mourning, starting yesterday, during which the tricolour will be flown half-mast and no government entertainment programme will be organised.

All Central government offices in Arunachal Pradesh remained closed today. The national flag was flown at half-mast yesterday and today in the the capitals of all States and Union Territories.

Hundreds of admirers of Khandu have paid their last respects to their beloved leader here since yesterday. The people lined up the route from the CM's residence to the helipad in Raj Bhawan as the mortal remains of Khandu were transferred in a flower-decked vehicle.

A Pawan Hans chopper, coming from Tawang to Itanagar with Mr Khandu on board, had gone missing minutes after take-off at 0950 hours on Saturday.

Besides Khandu, on board were two pilots J S Babbar and T S Mammik, the chief minister’s security officer Yashi Chadook and Yeshi Lhamu, sister of Tawang MLA Tsewang Dhondup.

The wreckage and bodies were recovered by locals near Luguthang in Tawang district four days later on Wednesday after a massive search operation in which more than 3500 personnel of the Army, Air Force and para-military forces as well as the State police were involved.

Meanwhile, 50-year-old Congress leader Jarbom Gamlin was last night sworn in as the new chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh.

Mr Gamlin, the Power Minister in Khandu's Cabinet, was administered the oath of office by the Governor , General (Retd) J J Singh, in Raj Bhawan after a majority of Congress Legislature Party (CLP) members backed his candidature for the post.

NNN

One need only look to the al-Qaida leader's surviving family to confirm the reality they witnessed

President Obama is right to stop publication of any of the "gruesome" death photos of Osama bin Laden. If there are people who believe that Bin Laden is still alive, no photograph will make them accept that he is not. They will assume it is a fake, just as the Americans who believe Obama was born outside the United States and is therefore ineligible to be president assume that his birth certificate is a fake. Nothing will persuade a conspiracy theorist to change his mind, especially not a photograph; for everyone today believes that photographs are easily doctored. So while the US would gain nothing by publishing one, it might have quite a lot to lose by it.

Obama has already pointed out that a photograph of Bin Laden's blood-soaked body could be used "as an incitement to additional violence or as a propaganda tool". But it also might provoke America's friends almost as much as its enemies. The operation in which Bin Laden died was conducted with great courage and efficiency, but it has already given rise to an unwelcome degree of American triumphalism. The publication of a photograph of Bin Laden with half his head blown away would make this worse: it would add an impression of gloating malevolence.

In Britain, America's closest ally, there is also a strong distaste for any photographs of this kind. While sexual images no longer give much offence, pictures of violent death still do. The position here is roughly the opposite of that on the continent of Europe, where newspapers are much more likely to publish shots of bodies in pools of blood than they are of naked women.

Anyway, Obama has grasped most of these points. He has said that releasing "very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head" is "not who we are"; "We don't trot out this stuff as trophies." He has also said that he doesn't believe a photograph would make any difference to people's attitudes: "The fact of the matter is, you will not see Bin Laden walking on this Earth again." To be honest, we haven't seen a lot of Bin Laden doing anything at all during the past 10 years, which is why some people speculated that he died long ago.

But there is much stronger evidence that he was killed this week than any photograph could provide. Despite the varying accounts of what happened in Abbottabad that night, there were many survivors of the commando raid, including Bin Laden's youngest wife, Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, now in a Pakistani hospital with a leg wound, and their 12-year-old daughter. Both appear to have witnessed his death, and it would be most surprising if they were to deny the reality of what they saw.

A bunker, complete with obligatory smoking ban

It is not unusual for people who commit mass murder to be fastidious about their own health. Adolf Hitler had a horror of smoking and forbade it among his staff, even in April 1945 when the Russian army was closing in on his bunker in Berlin. As it appeared in Downfall, the excellent film about Hitler's final days, the first thing his aides did after his suicide was to light up. Now it seems that Bin Laden may have shared Hitler's hatred of cigarettes.

Mohammad Usman, a shopkeeper in Abbottabad, says the courier who reportedly led the CIA and US special forces to Bin Laden's compound – a man called Arshad Khan – used to visit the shop with his brother once a week to buy basic household essentials. They also purchased one or two cigarettes for themselves – their preference being John Player Gold Leaf – and smoked them in the street outside the shop before returning home to the compound. They never bought a whole packet, Usman said.

This strongly suggests that a smoking ban was in force at Bin Laden's home. This is less surprising today than it would have been in Hitler's time: but you'd have thought that, even so, Bin Laden might have permitted his loyal followers to relieve the boredom and tension of life in the compound with the occasional fag. You might have expected similar indulgence to be granted to the (as far as we know) still smoking president of the United States, but even Obama doesn't smoke indoors. He has said that he continues to respect the smoking ban first imposed in the White House by his secretary of state Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady. This seems unusually fearful of him.

Not-so-common ground

Obama found time amid this week's excitements to receive Prince Charles at the White House and congratulate him on the wedding of his son William to Catherine Middleton. Americans, he said, had been "mesmerised" by the event; and while this sounds like something of an exaggeration, it is estimated that about 23 million Americans got up very early in the morning to watch the live television coverage.

It seems improbable that Obama was among them, but he would appear to have seen at least some of the proceedings, for he said he had been impressed by the way in which the young couple had handled the pressure. He was right to be impressed, for neither William nor Catherine showed any sign of nerves – nor any member of the Middleton family, who seemed to find it quite normal that a girl from their lowly background should be marrying a future king in Westminster Abbey. So, as a matter of fact, did I; there seemed to be no detectable class difference between the Middletons and the Windsors.

At 12.15pm last Monday afternoon, I turned on ABC News24 and was told that Barack Obama was due to appear on television at 12.30pm.  There was no information on what he intended talking about. Since this was 10.30pm on a Sunday night in Washington, you didn't need to be particularly bright to work out that something was up. 

Obviously there was an announcement that couldn't wait.  Without really thinking about it, I assumed it was related to Afghanistan or Iraq. 

I had work to do and didn't get back to the television until 12.35pm.  Obama had not yet appeared.  I opened up my Twitter client, TweetDeck, and discovered reports that Osama bin Laden was dead. By about 12.50pm, multiple media outlets were claiming they had confirmed these reports. 

Many of these claims were tweeted.  Some tweets contained a link to a website report. Between 12.30pm and 1.35pm when Obama finally appeared (at 11.35pm Washington time) most television stations and every cable network were all over the story.  Twitter was heaving.

A number of people retweeted Keith Urbahn, chief of staff to Donald Rumsfeld.  Urbahn is now seen as the man who first published the news about bin Laden. 

He has since pointed out that his source was a "network TV news producer".

During this time, I also became aware of a Twitter user @ReallyVirtual, who had unwittingly tweeted about the assault on bin Laden's compound as it happened. 

Many hours later, I looked at his account, read the tweets, and laughed at his dry humour.

By the time Obama appeared, I had read a number of articles on various US media websites, mainly CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times. 

The Times site was hard to reach, such was the traffic.  Most of these articles had little to say, apart from claiming that various sources were anonymously confirming the death of bin Laden.  Some ran profile pieces and timelines from 9/11.

Obama's appearance was far from an anti-climax because no details were available on what had taken place in Pakistan.  Until Obama spoke, no-one even knew the killing of bin Laden took place in Pakistan.  The short address confirmed what had been swirling on the internet and on television, and provided some brief details of what had occurred.  Many questions were left unanswered.

For the next couple of hours I relied on television and so-called mainstream media outlets for information and analysis.  There was much to read on media websites.  The people and organisations I choose to follow on Twitter provided links to articles of interest.

Television showed scenes of rapturous crowds outside the White House and at other places around the United States.  These pictures were punctuated by an army of commentators confidently pontificating on the significance of the occasion.

By late afternoon, Australian time, there was little new information to be had.  Aside from the people celebrating in the streets, the United States was fast asleep. I was out and about, so I turned to the car radio.  As always, you can rely on ABC radio's PM program for solid reporting, context and sensible analysis.  I think I learned more of value in those 40 minutes from 6.10pm than I had over the previous hours since 12.15pm. 

In fact, if I hadn't heard of bin Laden's death until 6pm, I would have been just as informed as any other average news consumer by 7pm.

Back home, I watched the evening news and 7.30.  The story continued to rest as we waited for the Americans to wake up.  As most Australians were going to bed on Monday night, new information emerged from briefings and interviews on American media outlets.

What's my point? 

Simply that I continue to marvel at the silly talk about Twitter and social media whenever a major event takes place. This was a "CNN moment", some said, on a par with that network's on-the-spot coverage of the Gulf War in 1991. This was another moment that showed the irrelevance of traditional media, some said.  "I get all my news from Twitter now," one enthusiast tweeted.

New media, social media, has outgunned traditional media, went the argument. Am I missing something? 

Yes, I learned about what had happened from Twitter.  I am a prolific user of Twitter.  I use it to monitor the news.   But Twitter is a tool, not a media outlet.  It's a platform.  Like Facebook and other social networking tools, it's a means of disseminating information.  It connects people.  And, yes, these days breaking news, some of it from non-journalists, tends to appear first on Twitter.

But so what? 

What did I really gain from just happening to be on Twitter in the hour before Obama appeared on television?  Very little.  If you're a news junkie, the buzz from watching an event unfold on your computer screen is quite absorbing and I happily admit I love these occasions.  But they don't amount to anything much.

Before going to bed on Monday night, I read a number of articles in the Australian newspapers and quite a lot from the American press, especially The New York Times.

Twelve hours after news of bin Laden's death leaked out, I was only just beginning to get my head around its significance and importance.  I'm still doing so, days after the event.

It's absurd to value the speed and immediacy of news over the completeness, complexity and understanding that only time, more information, reading and reflection can deliver.

It's absurd to value the instant judgements of journalists, pundits and assorted "experts" who appear in the media in the first minutes and hours after an event of significance.

Commonsense, let alone an appreciation of history, should tell us that we are a long way from comprehending the significance of the last couple of days. We certainly shouldn't get too excited about a tweet which delivered a piece of news before a television journalist did so.  These things may excite those whose livelihoods depend on the kudos of being first with the news but they don't have any practical effect on the rest of us.

It's far better to see the new platforms and technologies as complementary.  As this article by Erick Schonfeld on TechCrunch says, Twitter doesn't supplant other media, it amplifies it.

Don't forget, much of the material being tweeted last Monday afternoon came from Twitter users watching television or reading online media sites. That's why the traditional media outlets have set about colonising Twitter and dominating it.  Promotion of mainstream media publications, websites and television stations is ubiquitous on Twitter these days. 

If you’re interested in news, politics and current affairs, they’re hard to avoid, particularly when a presenter or a journalist is encouraged or required to tweet on their employer’s dime.

Unless it’s one of those events where ordinary citizens can contribute original eye-witness material, such as people did during the recent spate of natural disasters, the cacophony of social media chatter is often just as meaningless and diversionary as the more glittering babble offered up by the mainstream media.

Any knowledge and understanding I have of what happened in Pakistan on Sunday is derived primarily from traditional journalism delivered by traditional media outlets.  Much of this material was fed to the media by the US government at a time of its choosing and in the form it chose.  It came to me via traditional media outlets, even if Twitter was used to direct me there.

It's still down to me to maintain my interest in the things I think matter.  It's down to me to read widely, to think and to learn.  It’s my job to remain sceptical and questioning.

Most of all, it's down to me to not get distracted by the gaudy baubles of the media, mainstream or social.

A version of this article first appeared on Malcolm Farnsworth’s website AustralianPolitics.com.

• Read all responses to this article

Date: May 6th 2011 10:31a.m.
Contributed by: feer

The whole world is talking about Bin Laden's death. No matter how happy Americans or how sad the precious metal investors are, to most Chinese, it's the perfect chance for some gossip.

According to an online vote at a popular BBS, only 4.28 percent of Chinese feel joy at the news of Laden’s death. Over 30 percent of netizens say they don't feel affected at all.

Although the Chinese media pays attention to the big news and some Chinese are following the Bin Laden story, the masses have a rather flippant attitude about it. People are joking around and jeering this global news, of course, with “Chinese characteristics”.

Some of the funniest jibes:

After watching Jiang Wen’s film Let The Bullets Fly, Obama got inspired: He'll announce to the world that Bin Laden has been killed by the American army so that the real Laden becomes a substitute.

Bin Laden said during his lifetime, “China is the only country we can’t provoke! We dispatched five terrorists to China in the span of six months, but all failed. One was asked to bomb the overpass, but he lost his way. The second was going to bomb a bus, but he wasn't able to get on the bus. The third planted a bomb at a supermarket, but the bomb was stolen. The fourth was asked to destroy the train, but he wasn't able to buy a train ticket. The last terrorist successfully bombed a coal mine, but there wasn't any report about it on the local media, so the poor guy was killed for telling a lie. ”

When hearing that United States would throw Laden’s body into the ocean, the Japanese started to worry that Laden’s body would become ...

Read 'Pakistan threatens U.S. on cooperation if more raids' on Yahoo! News. ABBOTTABAD/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Pakistan's army threatened on Thursday to reconsider its anti-terrorism cooperation with the United States if Washington carried out another unilateral attack like the killing of Osama bin Laden. [Discuss] [Link]

ABBOTTABAD/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Pakistan's army threatened on Thursday to reconsider its anti-terrorism cooperation with the United States if Washington carried out another unilateral attack like the killing of Osama bin Laden.

'Extremely rare' planes coming to JWA - OCRegister | Included in the Wings of Freedom Tour, which is appearing at the Lyon Air Museum, is the B-17 "Flying Fortress," one of only 11 such aircraft in flying condition in the United States, according to promoters. The B-17 "Flying Fortress" will be among the ...
   
World War II Planes and Pilots Share Experiences at Palomar Airport - Patch.com | On display, through were the B-17 and B-24 bombers and a P-51 Mustang fighter. There were no shortage of veterans at Palomar Airport to tell their amazing stories and experiences. Ed Davidson, of La Jolla, recounted his WW II experiences as a pilot of ...

Naval History & Heritage Command  - photos of the 1st Carrier Qualified Jet Squadron. Happy Birthday VF-17A. (ak)

It's not a bird. It's not a plane. It's JetMan in a Grand Canyon flyover! - USA TODAY | If the red rock splendor of the Grand Canyon alone isn't enough to knock your socks off, you might want to high-tail it over there on May 6 when Yves Rossy -- aka JetMan -- straps on a wing powered by four jet engines and jumps out of a helicopter for his own bird's-eye flyover of the rugged chasm. ...

Timeless Voices - Robin "Bob" Webb from eaavideo.org | Bob Webb joined the Royal Air Force in 1943 and spent the next 14 years as an engineer/mechanic. In 1957 he joined the British Overseas Airways Corporation as a flight engineer, finishing the last 8 years of his 26-year career on the Concorde.

He attacked the Yamato, world’s biggest battleship from War Tales | It was Ensign Woody Lindskog’s lucky day. The Navy pilot was plucked from Wasile Bay off Halmahera Island in the South Pacific by an Army Air Corps Catalina flying boat, right under the nose of a Japanese gun emplacement and thousands of enemy troops after his Hellcat fighter was hit by an antiaircraft flak and [...]

Herman 'Rex' Reheis - AugustaGazette.com | He then went through flight training and piloted a B-25 low-level strafer-bomber called “Seabiscuit” during 11 months of campaigns in the South Pacific in the 500th Bomb Squadron, rising to Captain. After the end of World War II, he served in the Air ...

WWII veterans honored with DC trip - Richmond-News | A World War II veteran from New Richmond was honored for his service to the country during a special trip Saturday. A World War II veteran from New Richmond was honored for his service to the country during a special trip Saturday. ...

100-year-old Jacksonville man says do what you love, and adventure will follow - Jacksonville.com | ... In 1927, he was 17, too young for the Army Air Corps. No problem: He lied about his age. He was too skinny, too. So the recruiter gave him 50 cents and told him to buy as many bananas as he could. Brown stuffed the bananas in him, one after the other, then was weighed again. Heavy enough this time. ...

Shirley grandfather aims to break wing walk record - Birmingham Mail | The grandfather from Shirley, who already holds the world record for the oldest person to do the loop-the-loop and the oldest person to wing walk across the English Channel, is about to undertake his greatest adventure yet. Daredevil Tom, who is due to ...

The Boeing Archives PART 3b: Interview With Boeing Historian Michael Lombardi from Airline Reporter | This is the second part to my interview with Boeing Historian Michael Lombardi. Here is the continuation of our exclusive interview:  ...
   
Aviation Museum Faces Another Roadblock in Lease Arrangement - Patch.com | The Horsham Land Reuse Authority hopes to sign the lease at its May 18 meeting; meanwhile residents request that an airport study be undertaken. By Theresa Katalinas | Email the author | 6:00am As the military clears off the 1100-acre base, ...

Poplar Grove air museum gears up for additions - Rockford Register Star | Bob Grist, 77, of Chicago laughs as his friend Bill Gwozdz, 67, of Berwyn toys with his camera during their visit Tuesday, May 3, 2011, to the Vintage Wings & Wheels Museum in Poplar Grove. By Betsy Lopez POPLAR GROVE — The Vintage Wings & Wheels ...

Yorkshire Air Museum to play host to the Battlegroup North and Military Wheels ... - The Press, York | HUNDREDS of historic military vehicles from across Britain will be helping draw the crowds to the Yorkshire Air Museum this weekend. The museum, at Elvington, near York, will play host to the Battlegroup North and Military Wheels And ...

World’s largest (model) airport opens in Hamburg (Daily Mail) from Boeing and Aerospace News | Knuffingen Airport only cost around $5 million and took six years to build and yet is the world’s largest airport. OK, model airport. Knuffingen, based on Hamburg’s airport, just opened to the public at Miniatur Wunderland, in Hamburg. The airport features 40 aircraft that take off, land and taxi, with jetways that pull up to [...]

After 100 years, Goodyear ditches blimps for zeppelins [Planelopnik] from Jalopnik | After building blimps for almost 100 years, Goodyear's teaming up with Ze Germans and canning their three blips for a fleet of Teutonic zeppelins set to go into operation in 2013. The zeppelins will be longer, fly faster, and hold more people. None of which will help make it anything but a more novel way of providing a stadium shot before football and baseball telecasts go to commercial. ...

More than 130 local events now part of EAA’s International Learn to Fly Day - Planenews | EAA AVIATION CENTER, OSHKOSH, Wis.: More than 130 events will help dreams of flight become a reality for tens of thousands of future aviators during the second annual International Learn to Fly Day on Saturday, May 21.  International Learn to Fly Day is an aviation community-wide effort helping people of all ages take that first step to ...

Warren girl gets to be Pilot for a Day - Vindy.com | Eleven-year-old Ashley Moorhead offered an apt description after the turbo-prop engines of the huge C-130 Hercules aircraft fired up.  “It was real loud. We had to wear earplugs,” said an excited Ashley after being named Pilot for a Day on Wednesday at the 910th Airlift Wing at the Youngstown Air Reserve Station. ...

South Korean Navy’s first female P-3C pilot from Warplanes Online Community | The Korean Navy has commissioned its first female pilot of a P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft. Lt. Jg. Lee Joo-yeon, 26, finished her copilot training for a P-3C aircraft on April 22nd. After a year of basic aviation training, she completed her first flight mission last Tuesday. ...

Air Force: F-22 Raptor pulls out of air show - Shreveport Times | The Air Force's cutting-edge fight aircraft, which was to have been the start of the 2011 Barksdale Air Force base "Defenders of Liberty" air show and open house, will not be able to make it to the show this year, the Air Force said today. ...

BREAKING: USAF orders F-22 fleet stand-down from The DEW Line | Got a tip today that all F-22s have been parked. Air Combat Command confirmed a few minutes ago, and our news article is posted here and is excerpted below. ...

50 years of US spaceflight: Alan Shepard, May 5, 1961 from Boing Boing | On May 5, 1961, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard piloted his Freedom 7 Mercury capsule in a 15-minute suborbital flight, becoming America's first astronaut. In this image, he is shown being hoisted aboard a U.S. Marine helicopter after splashdown. The flight carried him to an altitude of 116 statute miles.  ...

Alan B. Shepard, Jr. Honored at 50th Anniversary Celebration of Freedom 7 Flight from Spaceports | The Golden Anniversary of the flight of the first American in space was commemorated with a special ceremony at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Complex 5/6 blockhouse near NASA's Kennedy Space Center. That's where, on May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr., began his historic, 15-minute mission aboard his Freedom 7 capsule. ...

Last combat veteran of WW1, Claude Choules, dies agd 110 from Military Photos | The world's last known combat veteran of World War I, Claude Choules, has died in Australia aged 110.  Known to his comrades as Chuckles, British-born Mr Choules joined the Royal Navy at 15 and went on to serve on HMS Revenge. ...

The Pakistani military issued a sharply worded statement today warning the US not to conduct covert actions in the future and ordering a reduction of US military personnel inside the country.

The statement, which was released by the Pakistani military's Inter-Services Public Relations branch, is attributed to comments made by General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Chief of Army Staff, during a meeting with the corps commanders. The meeting was held just four days after the US launched a covert raid that killed Osama bin Laden inside a fortified safe house in the city of Abbottabad.

"COAS [Chief of Army Staff] made it very clear that any similar action, violating the sovereignty of Pakistan, will warrant a review on the level of military / intelligence cooperation with the United States," the statement said.

"The Corps Commanders were informed about the decision to reduce the strength of US military personnel in Pakistan to the minimum essential," it continued.

In early April, after the controversial Raymond Davis affair, Pakistan is reported to have asked the US to dramatically reduce US military, CIA and contractor personnel, according to The New York Times. Davis, a CIA contractor who is thought to have been observing terrorist networks in Pakistan, shot and killed two Pakistanis in late January. He was held for nearly two months despite having diplomatic immunity.

In today's statement Kayani admitted to "shortcomings in developing intelligence on the presence of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan," but claimed that the military's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) is responsible for killing or capturing more than 100 top al Qaeda leaders and that it provided "initial information" that led to the bin Laden raid.

"However, in the case of Osama Bin Laden, while the CIA developed intelligence based on initial information provided by ISI, it did not share further development of intelligence on the case with ISI, contrary to the existing practice between the two services," the statement said.

Kayani also warned that its "strategic assets," or its nuclear weapons, would be heavily defended. Pakistan continues to produced nuclear weapons, and is estimated to have more than 100 serviceable warheads.

"As regards the possibility of similar hostile action against our strategic assets, the Forum reaffirmed that, unlike an undefended civilian compound, our strategic assets are well protected and an elaborate defensive mechanism is in place," the statement said.

Kayani further warned that India should not to attempt a similar raid on Pakistani territory, and "that any misadventure of this kind will be responded to very strongly. There should be no doubt about it."

Kayani's warning to the US comes as relations between the two countries are at an all-time low. Top US officials believe Pakistan was complicit in sheltering bin Laden. Two days ago, CIA Director Leon Panetta said that Pakistan could not be trusted with information about the planned raid to kill bin Laden.

"[I]t was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission," Panetta told TIME. "They might alert the targets."

Awaking to the news on Monday morning that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistanis had two ways to react: express outrage that the world's most-wanted terrorist had successfully sought sanctuary within their country's borders, with or without the assistance of Pakistan's security establishment; or, decry the fact that the United States had violated Pakistan's national sovereignty with a unilateral strike deep into its territory.[[BREAK]]

The fact that the Pakistani state and independent media have opted for the latter is no doubt frustrating for Washington, which is urgently trying to assess whether Pakistan remains an ally in the effort to stamp out terrorism. Since the news of bin Laden's killing broke, the Pakistani media has been railing against the American "insult" and "invasion" of its territory. The government, too, issued an obdurate statement describing the U.S. raid of bin Laden's compound as an "unauthorized unilateral action." What should have been an introspective moment has already become a defiant one. Rather than ask why bin Laden was able to live in Abbottabad, possibly since 2005, Pakistanis are asking how the U.S. managed to penetrate Pakistani airspace and hover for 40 minutes before leaving.

While Pakistanis fret about territorial violations, U.S. government officials have started asking difficult questions about bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad, and the nature of his support network within the country. Some members of Congress have called for economic assistance to Pakistan to be significantly reduced or suspended. Such enough-is-enough reactions are understandable, yet counterproductive, for they will only stir more defiance and reactionary tendencies among the Pakistani public. 

The fact is, Pakistanis are largely unmoved by the killing of bin Laden, but they are anxious about its potential fallout. The nation is currently bracing for a blowback, as the Taliban threatened retaliatory attacks barely hours after bin Laden's death had been announced.There are also widespread concerns about more unilateral strikes on Pakistani soil, especially after U.S. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers announced on Monday that at least a dozen senior al-Qaeda leaders are based in Pakistan.

Moreover, the Indian reaction to the news of bin Laden's killing has hardly helped matters. More than future U.S. actions, Pakistan fears that India may be emboldened by the Abbottabad raid to launch unilateral strikes against terrorist camps proximate to the eastern border. It is this cumulative paranoia of what might yet ensue that informed the weak response to the incident by Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir, who stated that the bin Laden operation "shall not serve as a future precedent for any state, including the U.S. Such actions undermine cooperation and may also sometime[s] constitute threat[s] to international peace and security."

In this perceived moment of vulnerability, the Pakistani public sphere is unlikely to turn against the Pakistan Army (except to criticize it for failing to prevent the U.S. incursion) and question its role in the bin Laden fiasco. Although the military and intelligence apparatus are the progenitors of Pakistan's current predicament (whether through duplicity, complicity, or incompetence), they are also being framed as the nation's last hope. 

Since Pakistan's creation, the army's institutional imperative has been to ensure state survival against threats posed by external enemies. The post-bin Laden concerns about interventionism play right into what Dr. Hasan Askari Rizvi has termed the Pakistan Army's "savior complex." In an ironic twist, a moment that should spark a crisis of credibility and a call for accountability could become an opportunity for the army to consolidate its role as the nation's protector against a variety of outside threats deemed to be existential. If this happens, the U.S. can only expect more of the same in its dealings with Pakistan.

But in the army's protectionist stance lies a rare opportunity to chart a new course in U.S.-Pakistan relations. Earlier this week, the Pakistani Ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, said that the government would conduct internal investigations to determine how bin Laden was able to live undetected in the Pakistani heartland, and whether any state or security officials were helping to shelter him. On Thursday, however, the Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir backtracked on this idea, suggesting that investigations into the whole episode be left to historians.

Pakistan's civilian government should not back down from the chance to conduct an inquiry. By supporting the civilian government in such an effort - whether in terms of capacity, by helping establish protocols and a timeline, or by applying back channel pressure on military officials to comply -- the U.S. and other members of the international community can help Pakistan's nascent civilian government hold the army accountable. Such a move would significantly boost the government's credibility by helping it answer the Pakistani public's many burning questions regarding the bin Laden incident.

No doubt, inquiries in Pakistan are a bit of a sham, a highly refined form of political dodging and deferral. The current government alone has launched several inquiries into matters ranging from corrupt practices in accommodating Hajj pilgrims to match-fixing allegations against members of the national cricket team. None of these have yielded positive outcomes. Moreover, historic inquiries such as the Hamoodur Rehman commission - which investigated alleged atrocities committed in Bangladesh during the 1971 war with India - have set a poor precedent for such processes (that report was not made public until decades after the fact, and was found severely lacking).

But this needn't be the case again. Citing pressure from the international community to provide answers, the civilian government should appoint an independent, public commission to investigate the nature and scope of bin Laden's network within Pakistan. The commission should also investigate the army and intelligence agencies' claim that bin Laden's presence, and the U.S. raid it provoked, were the consequences of an "intelligence failure." Such a commission should be empowered -- and encouraged -- to summon high-ranking military and intelligence officials for interrogation.

This inquiry must be a purely civilian exercise that drives home the fact that the Pakistan Army is ultimately accountable to the Pakistani people through their elected representatives. It should be conducted solely by Pakistanis, without any foreign interference, but its findings should be shared with the world. And if the commission determines that bin Laden's presence and the Abbottabad raid resulted from army and intelligence failings, it should launch a stringent review of the Pakistan Army's defense expenditure. 

These actions will help reorient the conversation in Pakistan to focus more on the pitfalls of the country's current national security strategy. It will also put U.S.-Pakistan relations back on the right track. Seeking long-term, sustainable bilateral relations with Pakistan, the U.S. enacted the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009.  Assistance mandated by that act seeks to support Pakistan's democratically elected civilian government to develop increased oversight of national security issues, and maintain "effective civilian control of the military" and its institutions.  

Despite the positive language, though, the Obama administration has prioritized military-to-military exchanges with Pakistan, owing to a narrow focus on counterterrorism operations and the military and political endgame in Afghanistan. The recently concluded episode involving Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor who shot and killed two Pakistanis in Lahore in January, showed the extent to which the U.S. government is willing to defer to military officials at times of crisis. However, it is the world's historic reliance on the Pakistan Army that led us to Abbottabad. A new approach by the U.S., and a new debate within Pakistan, may yet show us the way out. 

Huma Yusuf is a columnist for Pakistan's Dawn newspaper and the Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

If you click on the URL www.gutsycall.com, you will notice that - as of this writing - it redirects you to the Obama 2012 re-election campaign website. The URL was apparently purchased yesterday, although the purchaser seems to have covered its tracks. It would appear that this is being done with the intention of using “Gutsy Call” as a campaign slogan for Obama’s 2012 campaign, in an effort to capitalize on President Obama’s decision -after just 16 hours of deliberation - to order the operation that led to Osama bin Laden’s death.

If that’s the plan, it speaks badly of President Obama as a leader and of the political instincts of his campaign team.

You see, the President of the United States is, first and foremost, the leader of a team. That’s why we generally look for proven leaders to do the job - people who have led others and run things have a sense not only of how you make things happen as President, but how to handle successes and failures that depend on those working beneath them. As the football saying goes, when you get to the end zone, know how to act like you’ve been there before. Presidents invariably get both more credit and more blame than they deserve - as Harry Truman loved to say, “the buck stops here” - and they can’t always control the people under them; Truman also famously remarked of his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, “Poor Ike. It won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll sit here and he’ll say, ‘Do this, do that,’ and nothing will happen.”

The takedown of Osama bin Laden was a magnificent example of teamwork by this Administration, building on the tools and the leads developed by the previous Administration. The intelligence community, under the leadership of CIA Director Leon Panetta, the military under the leadership of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, coordinated by National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, among others - whatever other criticisms we may have of them on other days, all are part of a team that can take a well-deserved victory lap for tracking bin Laden to Abbottabad, planning and carrying out a mission to get him, and keeping the whole thing a secret all the way. Indeed, that’s the message of the now-iconic photo from the White House - the whole national security team is there, with the President off in one corner.

There is nothing wrong with that picture. The President assembles the team, the President approves the options they bring him, the President gets out of the way while the professionals do their job. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. And if President Obama is savvy about this unaccustomed trip to the end zone, that’s how he’ll play it and have his campaign spokesmen play it - just another day at the office, a job well done by all around, a victory that speaks for itself. No “spiking the football,” so to speak. Early polls certainly show that even Americans who aren’t fond of Obama or his presidency generally give him credit for a job well done here, and don’t need to have it explained to them why they should do so.

But if his campaign - the same campaign that ran on the vacuous and unsubtle “Yes We Can” and “Hope and Change” slogans in 2008 - intends to trumpet Obama’s decision to greenlight this mission as a heroic “gutsy call,” they could end up overplaying their hands as badly as John Kerry did with his “Reporting for Duty” convention. Because for all the credit Obama deserves for how things were accomplished on his watch by his team, there was nothing especially heroic or gutsy about making the decision to get bin Laden. Yes, Obama could have bombed bin Laden’s compound without sending in troops, and indeed he reportedly turned down the chance to do just that in March. That was the pre-9/11 Clinton-era approach to terrorist-hunting that President Bush famously derided (“When I take action, I’m not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt”), but it’s hard to imagine a post-9/11 American president who wouldn’t have given the green light to kill bin Laden by any means available, given the chance. Certainly plenty of high-value targets were taken out during the Bush years (Saddam, Zarqawi, Uday & Qusay, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), some of them by U.S. troops under hazardous conditions. And plenty of not-so-bold previous presidents have approved high-risk missions of this sort - Jimmy Carter approved the Desert One operation to rescue the Iranian hostages, Gerald Ford (with the advice of, among others, then-Chief of Staff Don Rumsfeld) approved the effort to rescue the crew of the SS Mayaguez. Sure, it could have gone badly, and the President had to sweat that in a way few civilians do when they make decisions. But ultimately, so what? If the Lakers are down 3 points with just a few ticks on the clock and they give the ball to Kobe Bryant, there’s a pretty good chance they lose the game (Kobe hits a 3-pointer only about a third of the time). But any coach in his right mind still gives the ball to Kobe. That’s not a gutsy call, it’s the only call. Who wouldn’t try to get bin Laden when you find out he’s sitting right there in the center of town?

Nor did Obama act with any particular heroic dispatch - while the 16 hours it took him to pull the trigger may seem fast compared to his months of indecision on the Afghan surge or weeks of agonizing while the Libyan resistance got routed, it is hardly the stuff that episodes of 24 are made of. You can’t argue with the results, but that’s not because Obama acted heroically but because the team of which he was the leader, all the way down to the SEALs who carried out the toughest and most dangerous parts of the plan, acted well as a team. Gutsy mission? Yes. Gutsy call? Not so much.

Why would Obama feel the need to overplay his own role in this, if “gutsy call” is indeed going to be a campaign slogan? We can only speculate whether from political desperation, a cynical view of the electorate or just an overweening need to be the center of attention.

Perhaps Obama and his campaign team are just too insecure to make this a team victory, especially since the team includes Gates (a Bush appointee as Secretary of Defense), Admiral Mullen (another Bush appointee as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs), Panetta (Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff) and the Secretary of State, his old primary rival Hillary Clinton. Perhaps his campaign team wants this to be all about The One making a “gutsy call” that was the only decision any reasonable person would make under the circumstances. If so, that’s a sad comment on our Commander-in-Chief and probably bad politics as well. You’re in the end zone, Mr. President. Thank the offensive line and act like you’ve been there before.

Other screenings women may want to consider are colon, rectal and chlamydia screenings. Starting at age 50, women should have a colonoscopy once every 10 years and women under the age of 25 should have regular chlamydia screenings, according to Yohn.

WASHINGTON – Today, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key Administration posts:

• Michael H. Corbin, Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Department of State
• Jeffrey DeLaurentis, Alternate Representative of the United States for Special Political Affairs in the United Nations, with the rank of Ambassador
• Jeanine E. Jackson, Ambassador to the Republic of Malawi, Department of State
• William H. Moser, Ambassador to the Republic of Moldova, Department of State

President Obama said, “These individuals have demonstrated knowledge and dedication throughout their careers. I am grateful they have chosen to take on these important roles, and I look forward to working with them in the months and years to come.”

President Obama announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key Administration posts:

Michael H. Corbin, Nominee for Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Department of State
Michael H. Corbin, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, currently serves as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.  Prior to this assignment, Mr. Corbin was Minister-Counselor for Political-Military Affairs at Embassy Baghdad from 2008 to 2009 and Charge d’Affaires in Damascus, Syria from 2006 to 2008.  Since joining the Foreign Service in 1985, Mr. Corbin has held various positions overseas and in Washington, including: Minister Counselor for Economic and Political Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo (2003-2006), Deputy Director of the Office of Arabian Peninsula Affairs (2001-2003), Director of the Counter-Narcotics Section at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, Venezuela (1997- 2001), Political-Military Affairs Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo (1994-1997) and at the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait (1987-1989).  Prior to joining the Foreign Service, he served in the Peace Corps from 1982 to 1984 in Mauritania. Mr. Corbin received a B.A. from Swarthmore College.  

Jeffrey DeLaurentis, Nominee for Alternate Representative of the United States for Special Political Affairs in the United Nations, with the rank of Ambassador
Jeffrey DeLaurentis, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, currently serves as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs.  Prior to this assignment, Mr. DeLaurentis served as Minister Counselor for Political Affairs and Security Council Coordinator at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York.   Since beginning his State Department career in 1991, Mr. DeLaurentis has served in a number of overseas posts including Political/Economic Section Chief at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, Political Counselor at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Geneva, and Political Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota.  In Washington, Mr. DeLaurentis served as Executive Assistant to the Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Director of Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council, and as an International Relations Officer in the Bureau of International Organizations.  Prior to entering the Foreign Service, Mr. DeLaurentis held a senior staff position at the Council on Foreign Relations.   Mr. DeLaurentis is a graduate of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and Columbia University Graduate School of International and Public Affairs.

Jeanine E. Jackson, Nominee for Ambassador to the Republic of Malawi, Department of State
Jeanine E. Jackson is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service and currently serves as the Minister Counselor for Management at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.   Prior to this role, Ms. Jackson served as U.S. Ambassador to Burkina Faso.   Since joining the U.S. Foreign Service in 1985, her other overseas assignments included Management Counselor at Embassy Kabul; Supervisory General Services Officer at Embassy Nairobi; Personnel Officer at the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong; Chief of the Consular Section at the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah; General Services Officer at Embassy Lagos; and Vice Consul at the U.S. Consulate in Zurich.  During Washington assignments, she served in the Bureaus of African, European and Near East Asian Affairs.  Ms. Jackson holds the rank of Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve.  She earned a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from Florida Institute of Technology and a Bachelor’s Degree in Art Education from Hastings College.

William H. Moser, Nominee for Ambassador to the Republic of Moldova, Department of State
William H. Moser is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service and currently serves as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Logistics Management at the U.S. Department of State.   Since joining the U.S. Foreign Service in 1984, Mr. Moser’s domestic and overseas assignments have included:  Director of Global Support Services and Innovation; Management Counselor at Embassy Kiev; Post Management Officer in the Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs; Energy Attaché/Economic Officer and Management Officer at Embassy Almaty; Political Military Officer in the Office of Regional Support and Security Assistance; Administrative Officer at Embassy Paramaribo; Disbursing/Financial Management Officer at Embassy Cairo; Consular Officer and Staff Assistant at Embassy Bonn; and General Services Officer at Embassy Bamako.   Mr. Moser received a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

What a difference ten years makes? On September 11, 2001 America was attacked by Al-Qaeda. In that moment Bin Laden succeeded in initiating a series of events that would eventually kick over the delicate house of cards that was the American Empire. On September 14, 2001 President Bush would stand triumphantly over the rubble of the World Trade Center where he would proceed to beat the drums of war and blow the trumpets of patriotism. A fews later, speaking to the best impulses of Americans as citizen-consumers, Bush told us that to defy the terrorists that we should all go shopping.

Ten years later, President Barack Obama would return to the site of the World Trade Center and bring some closure to the events of that horrific day. Obama put the hit on Osama. The bogeyman was dead. Now we can move forward as a nation. The symbolic politics are powerful here: The President is our national cheerleader, an informal Head of State, and the embodiment of America's hopes and dreams. Thus, the fixation by the Birthers and the New Right in denying America's first Black President the legitimacy of his position as Commander in Chief precisely because the white racial frame cannot accept a person of color as Chief Executive.

The President's return to the hallowed grounds of 9-11 is also pregnant with no small amount of irony in how the politics of race are punctuated by occasional deviations from the script in the Age of Obama. Black folks have always been loyal patriots. We loved a country that did not love us back.

However, our patriotism is also sophisticated and qualified for we are suspicious of power and are keen to the lies (both big and small) that leaders tell--and how American democracy was exclusive of people of color. Moreover, the flag waving drums of war moments that accompany America's call to battle and triumphalism are often moments of violence, where white Americans renew the brotherhood of citizenship by shedding the blood of black and brown folk.

The Zoot Suit Riots, the lynching of African American GI's while still in their uniforms, the Bloody Summer of 1919, and the acts of discrimination both subtle and gross by the Greatest Generation against black and brown folk in the Age of Jim Crow are testimonies to this ugly history. History is not dead. It lingers in our collective consciousness. For a Blues People, history's echoes run deep. By comparison, one of the historical advantages of Whiteness is the ability to be ahistorical--a people without roots, origins or responsibility.

Thus, when black and brown folks hear chants of "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" we are right to be suspicious and fearful, for those nationalist orgasmic utterances have often accompanied a trip to the lynching tree or a bloodied blow to the head as the imagined fraternity of white men was reinscribed and renewed at our expense. The Birthers, White Populism and the Tea Bag GOP's embrace of real American White Nationalism is one more reminder of this exclusive club's continued existence into the 21st century. But for a moment, Obama's trip to Ground Zero has--for a few days--upset this dynamic.

Here is one from the archives (wow, four years have gone by?). Today, we have quite a few new visitors curious of the kind people at Crooks and Liars, so it always fun to reach back and bring out a classic piece. The following post is on John Horn's shooting of two burglars in Texas a few years back. This essay remains one of my favorite pieces of all time for a variety of reasons.

There is a nice synergy here: the post speaks to the noxious brew of racialized Patriotism and nationalism that is channeled through those old howls of "U.S.A.!"; the coveted shit-huffer award was introduced here; and there is no small dose of ghetto nerdness on display. Good stuff...at least in my opinion.

****

We are a Nation of Liars, Crooks, Fools, Thieves, and Idiots

A few months back, a story circulated regarding a drug called, "jenkem." Apparently, this "new" drug, a product of Africa of course--where those poor natives do nothing but fight famine, suffer under genocide, live in failed States, and huff shit--consists of human feces and urine in a bong. Here, the "user" would take a "hit" by inhaling the noxious fumes generated by this ungodly concoction:

By Michael Smith (Veshengro)

By the end of 2011 the United States Army will have ended its dependence on the grid at several major homeland bases. It is also sending technology to Afghanistan that’s designed to minimize energy consumption of generators on bases there. The goal is to reduce the number of fuel deliveries that convoys need to be make across dangerous parts of the country.

The first field-ready “microgrid” will link a base’s generators to a central controller that will turn them on and off depending on if they’re actually needed. A system has been tested in Ft. Irwin, Calif. The Army hopes to deploy it by the summer.

Its one of a number of off-grid and microgrid initiatives being tested by the military that will prove the potential of off-grid energy to serve medium-sized communities and may then make its way into civilian use.

The Army is preparing to supervise joint technology testing at three homeland bases next year that will allow the services to measure the effectiveness of microgrids and their potential to make energy infrastructures more efficient and cyber-secure.

The problem I can see is that they will not be able to make those microgrids secure against cycber attacks, regardless of all the talk and hype and this is where the vulnerability, in the same was as with the general “smart” grid lies.

As soon as we rely on computers and especially on networked computers to control the turning on and off of such things, etc., we are open to attack. Personally, I still think that we are implementing those smart grid technologies at our peril. Bring back the human hand. Yes, it is a little slower and humans can fall asleep but they are not going to be falling prey to an attack from cyberspace.

The Defense Department has begun exploring microgrid technology for military bases at home because of their potential to make installations more energy efficient and secure should disaster or cyber intrusions strike the commercial grid, the say.

But if I consider the attacks against military computer networks and the success rate of penetration then this is something that would not make me feel safe at all. Far from it.

Harold Sanborn, the Army Corps of Engineers’ technical manager for the JCTD, said the microgrid technology being installed at the bases will integrate energy from existing diesel-power generators and renewable sources to power daily operations. The systems, which will provide the energy infrastructure with the situational awareness needed to more efficiently regulate power distribution, will also be cyber-secured when connected to the commercial grid.

The military needs to wake up to the fact that while they may be going off grid using diesel generators they need to green their footprint and that can only be done if and when they embrace more of the renewable energy technologies.

In fact the military could be leading the way and while it is said that this technology of microgrids will be finding its way into civilian applications and use diesel generators are not the answer.

There would be, in the main, no need to use anything else but renewable power sources if we would just wake up to the fact, including and especially the military, that 110 volts AC in the US, or 220/240 volts AC in UK and Europe, is not needed whatsoever and that we could do it all by 12 volts DC.

We need to rethink our electricity usage and here especially here as regards of voltage and current type.

© 2011

In his Distant Voices (1994), John Pilger narrates how a Soviet intellectual got the shock of his journalistic life during his visit to the US in the mid-1980s. He spent a few days in New York studying American print and electronic media. He concluded: in the Soviet Union, we suppress media to block divergent ideas. In the US, despite an immense profusion of media, there is such a remarkable unanimity of opinion on critical issues! Despite so many claims of freedom of expression, the American media, he felt, was complicit with the American government over various state agendas, which led to human rights abuses and suppression of freedoms in and outside the US.

If the same Soviet intellectual could visit Pakistan today, he would find that in Pakistan, the (electronic and print) media’s pandering to and unanimity of view(s) over the Pakistani military’s ‘causes and needs’ has made the American media’s complicity look like a minor coincidence. When it comes to the military, especially the Pakistan Army, the media finds, hears, or sees no evil, and smells no rat. Here is the weekly round-up in its chronology that I watched on a channel on Friday, April 15 (the same news items were aired by other channels too, but in this short column I cannot enumerate all of them):

1. Pakistan’s foreign debts are now 58 billion dollars.

2. India has set its sights on Gilgit-Baltistan now. After aiding and abetting the Baloch insurgents, India has set itself a new goal to cause Pakistan’s disintegration. It has started supporting separatist elements in Gilgit-Baltistan. The Gilgit-Baltistani terrorists plan to hold protest rallies for the rights of the people of Gilgit-Baltistan. The first objective India wants to achieve through these terrorists is to block the trade route between Pakistan and China. The US has also decided to support these terrorists. Soon American government-sponsored meetings will be held in the US [the channel did not identify in which cities] in which expatriate terrorists of Gilgit-Baltistani origin will kick off a campaign for ‘independent Balwaristan’.

3. The ISI chief has told the CIA boss directly that Pakistan will not accept the drone attacks.

4. The American government has said [apparently, only after the ISI chief had left] that it will continue to launch drone attacks.

5. Iran offloaded passengers from an airplane and arrested a suspected terrorist. A Pakistani official delegation, on board, was also offloaded.

6. Saudi Arabia will provide a monorail service to Pakistani pilgrims. Of all the South Asian countries, it is only Pakistanis who will have this facility.

7. In the forthcoming budget, there will be 18 percent increase in the money allocated for the military.

 

Let us take a closer look. The media is telling Pakistanis that they are insecure. India, the eternal enemy, is closing in on us from both sides, i.e., Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan. The US, more of an enemy than a friend, is also complicit in the conspiracy to break up Pakistan. Iran offloaded the Pakistani delegation. The insinuation of an inimical Iran is subtle, but cannot be missed. Iran evokes fear.

But then it is not just the enemies without who are lurking out there. The ‘Balwaristan terrorists’ are about to start subversion. Another subtle insinuation: Gilgit-Baltistan has a majority of Shias, and the present provincial government is dominated by the Shias. Iran, the country that offloaded our delegation, is also a Shia majority state.

Nevertheless, there is good news too. The ISI chief went to the States and returned, and it was only after his return that the Americans dared say that they would continue to send the drones. Saudi Arabia is good news. The Pakistani viewers should be thankful that Saudi blessings during the Hajj will be showered on Pakistanis only. The last news item on the weekly round up: 18 percent hike in the budget for the ‘defense of the country’. Education and health put together will not receive more than two percent of the forthcoming budget as opposed to 70 percent reserved for the ‘defense of the country’.

The real test of the media loyalty to the Pakistan Army, however, came on 2 May when the American Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden. The killing itself is insignificant compared to what is at stake: the credibility of the Army and its intelligence wing the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). He was killed in the safest possible place in Pakistan. His castle was less than a kilometer from Pakistan’s premier military academy. Before any Pakistan could hear or say that the Army had been sheltering and protecting Osama, the media launched a nonstop blitzkrieg to divert Pakistani people’s attention to other issues by scaring them with the spectre of the ‘evil’ forces out to destroy Pakistan. Hundreds of examples can be cited here, but a few representative ones should suffice.

One anchor who can see the suffering of the people of Gaza from the shore of Karachi, but cannot see the (Pakistani) people of Parachinar being daily killed by the Army-backed Haqqani Taliban, went hysterical, telling his viewers that the Americans jammed Pakistan’s radars when they raided Osama’s castle. The issue in his opinion was not where Osama was found and who sheltered him, but the fact that now “the Americans will look for Pakistan’s secret defense-related (i.e., nuclear) installations in the name of searching for terrorists. Our [nuclear] sites are not safe anymore.”

“How long would the Americans continue to violate the sovereignty of Pakistan?” thundered another anchor, “As if drone attacks in Pakistan’s northern areas were not a blatant violation of our sovereignty! Now they are attacking us so close to our capital!” An anchor, a Taliban apologist who makes strange claims about how people think and react vis-à-vis the Americans, speculated about which Pakistanis had been collaborating with the Americans - implying that the civilian government of President Zardari had facilitated the action, and by doing so had undermined the Army. Yet another anchor said: “I am standing on a pile of ashes and a volcano is raging inside me! Out national honor has been violated!”

Not a single anchor said that the Army, or some rogue elements in the Army, should be held accountable for harbouring Osama. No one asked a basic moral question: When you have taken billions of dollars from the Americans and promised to act against the terrorists, why would you support the super terrorist? Is it not pure cheating taking someone’s money and acting against them? But, no. In order to divert people’s attention from the culprits who gave sanctuary to Osama, our anchors in their ‘love’ of Pakistan and its ‘sacred institutions’ (i.e., the Army and the ISI) have sacrificed all norms of professional integrity and ethics.

The inevitable conclusion, therefore, is this: Who needs education and health when the very security of the ‘country’ is at risk? What is the point going to school or to hospital when the enemies within and without are operating? The very idea behind the security state is that civilians are expendable, that there is no need to build civilian institutions because we are permanently invaded, that when the whole world is your enemy, you must build an almighty army. National security must be safeguarded all the time even if the people end up as illiterate and in poor health. A country without people is acceptable, but what is a country without defense capabilities? Thus, education and health are a small price to pay for the sake of the ‘country’! This reasoning is why the media never takes the army to task for not allowing the government to audit the billions it squeezes from the exchequer, which belong to the people of Pakistan.

In the same book, Pilger writes: “Without the loyalty of The New York Times and other august (mostly liberal) media institutions ‘of record’, the criminal invasion of Iraq might not have happened and a million people would be alive today.” In Pilger’s style, I would like to say: without the loyalty of the Pakistani media, the army would not have been able to get away with billions of rupees every year in the name of national security leaving millions of Pakistanis without proper access to education and health. Think about it: 17 million Pakistani kids do not go to school because there are not any they can go to; and one government hospital caters for about half a million Pakistanis.

The United States has said that no one in the Pakistan military or intelligence community knew about the US raid on Osama bin Laden's residence in Abbottabad.  The Pakistan government, military and intelligence service likewise disclaimed prior knowledge. 

It doesn't add up.  And the reason it doesn't add up is because it is not true.

GlobalPost reports:

Pakistani officials have told GlobalPost that the Pakistani army had full knowledge of the U.S. raid that led to the death of Osama bin Laden and that it played a larger role in the operation than previously acknowledged.

One senior military official, who asked not to be named because he is not permitted to speak to the press, said that Pakistani army troops were in fact providing backup support when the United States began its operations inside the compound where bin Laden had been staying, including sealing off the neighborhood where the compound was located.

Residents in the area confirmed that the Pakistan army appeared to have at least some knowledge of the operation well before it began. Several residents said that two hours before the United States launched its attack, Pakistani army personnel ordered them to switch off their lights inside and outside their homes and remain indoors until further notice.

“The army personnel cordoned off the entire area long before we heard the sounds of helicopters hovering over the area,” said Zulfikar Ahmed, who lives in the Abbottabad neighborhood of Bilal Town, where bin Laden’s compound is located. Locals interviewed by the BBC and several other local and international media outlets made similar statements.

You can read the full report here. The reason that both the US and Pakistan governments proclaimed that Pakistan had no prior knowledge of the raid was to protect the Pakistan government from the wrath of its citizenry (or some of its citizenry).  It was, as they say, useful fiction. 

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See Also:

• Politics In 60 Seconds: What You Need To Know Right Now
• Gallup: Public Gives Military, CIA High Marks For Bin Laden Raid
• Pakistan Says It Had No Idea Where Osama Bin Laden Was Hiding

Coming under sharp criticism for not preventing the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Pakistan's army called for the U.S. to reduce its military footprint in that country and said "any similar action will warrant a review" of Pakistan's military and intelligence cooperation with the United States.

by Nezua

[Trigger warning for racism, violence, Othering, dehumanization.]

Hola, family. My name is Nezua and you may know me as the creator of The Unapologetic Mexican blog. My thanks to Melissa for inviting me to write here at Shakesville, after her reading a stream of tweets I fired off in reaction to the White House releasing President Obama's long form birth certificate in response to Donald Skunkstump's blathering about all the darkies at the water fountain or whatever it was he was trying to say. I know that moment has been eclipsed in the media since Osama Bin Laden was reportedly killed, but the issue of US and THEM is not unrelated, and Them Who Shall Be Asked for Papers know this as well as anyone.

This is an article I have taken my time with, and brevity was not the first priority. It will not be a fast read. I hope you can get to it with a drink, or a sandwich, or a cup of tea.

We begin, but do not end, with the sensational incident where the Obama White House, under Trumpian pressure, produced for public inspection the President's "long form" birth certificate.

I do not know how successful I will be in my attempts to navigate the journey, but I think it's important to move from an immediate feeling of hurt or anger to a broader view of the very thing that moves behind this event and is so upsetting about it. This is what I will try to do.

* * *

Why can't we roam this open country?
Oh, why can't we be what we wanna be?
We want to be free.

--Bob Marley, 3 o'Clock Roadblock

ROADBLOCK

What a frenzy.

What a storm of feelings, thoughts, tweets, and emotions were exploded into view with that one event, where the President of the United States of America—a man of color—answered the insincere jeering of a single white citizen by producing his identity papers for inspection. As if our duly elected President was but a teen at a police checkpoint, wearing baggy pants and with his hands up against the hood. As if he were a young man standing on a corner looking Mexicano, immediately suspect and thus beholden to the law man to prove he was not up to criminal acts. What a shaking of the timbers of racial history were felt up and down the blogosphere in this one simple happening.

And rightly so. What a harsh reality we trade in; that it will take far more time than our grandparents', parents', or our own lifetimes to evolve past the sickly, sadistic, inhuman history we Americans share on matters of race. In matters of history—look to Mexico, or China, or Egypt—this country is in an infantile stage. And the things that were done to African Americans, and Indians (indigenous peoples from el Norte as well as from south of the "border"); to Chinese and Japanese and Chileans and so on.... These ghosts will not fade fast.

Donald Trump is one of those ghosts, his expression forever puckered like a lemon-shocked anus-mouth, his mind alight with tired stereotypes and bursts of fart-static. A clown who doesn't have the decency to laugh at himself.

And Donald is so easy to hate, isn't he? Because he is a hateful man. And because he enlists the powers of hate, hate long rooted in American soil. Hate that long ago drew blood and tossed ropes and smiled for the picture as the body cooled to a dusk-like temperature. Hate that raided Native American villages to murder sleeping children. Hate that buffed its boots before demanding that black men duck their eyes, and go drink from some other fountain. Hate that considers women, and Blacks and Cubans and Haitians and Iraqis and Afghanis and Mexican and Chinese and Vietnamese and Puerto Rican as less than human. Hate today that spends Joe Arpaio's paycheck, props up his decaying frame, and parades his prisoners in pink. Hate yesterday that reneged on treaties, and swallowed up gold, and burned codices.

Donald Trump is animated by the very same hate that is used to divide so many people today, and strives to obscure the roots of our liberation as it obscures the hands that lock the cuffs on us. It is a disease of the mind and soul called White Supremacy. And in the land wherein this virus thrives, certain kinds of men, with their ballooned minds and feverish egos, get to demand certain concessions from other people: that you surrender your papers; that you not harbor anger in your eye or your tone lest it be beaten out of you; that law shall endorse such beatings; that you prone out on the ground with a gun in your back at a moment's notice; that you swallow a bullet if the bully feels sexy while perched up there and straddled around your spine. It is a land where you apologize for a role you never asked for but is ascribed to you by thieves and liars; where They will always have the right to tell you to pull over and prove yourself, and where You will always comply and perhaps be allowed to live with just humiliation if you are lucky enough to walk away with your life.

And so the target of so much history, for a day, becomes Donald "I am the Patriarchy" Trump. And many hearts seethe for his being so cruel as to remind us of our history, and to imply that even when you gain The Most Powerful Office in the World, it means nothing next to the anger of a White Man. It was the same reminder Republican Senator Joe "YOU LIE" Wilson gave us when he shouted down the President of the United States in the middle of an address that was adorned with all the pomp and decorum as we see fit to afford our nation's executive leader. That shout, that demand to show papers, that insistence that you duck your eyes, it hisses You can even become President, but you still are not White. Which means you are not really the President. Don't go dreaming that somehow you are now more powerful than me, darkie.

And as an immediate and visceral (and predictable) reaction, what did so many of us people of color need to see the President do? We needed him to scoff at the implication that such assertions could be true. We needed him to refute that reality. To deny it exists. To stand up and stand proud. To destroy that reality with a new action.

Was coughing up the papers but then roasting Trump at a gala dinner in front of the Press enough? Was ordering the home invasion and murder of a wanted man of color in Pakistan enough to erase that reality? Perhaps for our empathy with Obama being humiliated, it was. Perhaps now the unpleasant memory of watching the national daddy figure bow to a carnival barker has been mitigated for most. Maybe now that feeling, as if we watched the POTUS hand over his lunch money to bullies, has been nullified, gunsmoke wafting about our heads like purifying incense smoke.

And I suppose it is best to take the man at his word: he saw the Birtherism (also known as "Racism") wasn't going to go away and wanted to squash it and force the GOP ravers into a corner by removing what he saw as their last leg in what was left of the Birther argument.

But I do not think it does the larger issue any service to forget it when the feelings fade, or to imagine it resolved because the President has shown his papers, is in the clear, and we are feeling tough again because, damn son—he's got that killer instinct. Just as Rosa Parks' challenge was not to one bus driver, but to an entire system of inequality, this matter is much broader and deeper than the pageantry that recently unfolded between two rich men on TV.

Yes, the dynamic where we identify culturally or ethnically in some way with President Obama (and as a man of color, I do) leads us to watch the disgusting Trump claim victory for making the President skip on command, and we fume with empathy. We gnash our teeth and swear our allegiance all over again to Barack, this poor besieged man who has to endure the barbs and slings of Age Old Racism. This intelligent, thoughtful scholar, statesman, gentleman, father and husband. This President who bears up nobly in conditions potentially humiliating, conditions asked of no other President has been before him. We spit on the ground and growl Trump's name. We swear to show up in the voting booth for the Democrats...as if that in any measurable way addresses the larger issue of Them Who Shall Be Asked for Papers.


CONQUER AND DIVIDE

I should probably clearly state the obvious in case it is not as obvious as I'd hope: the American Black experience is deep, unique, and I highly respect it. I would never claim to see it in all its parts or stand within it. I am not pretending to have any stake or voice therein. At the same time, I have my own experiences as a Xicano, and there is some degree of overlap between the experiences of all people of color in this nation. This I know from years of activism and friendships and conversations with people of different ethnicities.

Also—quite important to suss out and account for—there are (exploitable) gaps between our experiences. It is in those gaps that divide and conquer wedges are introduced by the ruling class.

Strategically, it is in marginalized peoples' great interest to discover these gaps ourselves so they cannot be exploited casually. It is in our great interest to find them, examine them, and prepare for the attacks that will be launched; attacks that would seek to exploit the latent weaknesses that could threaten our unity as people marginalized and exploited by the oppressive, racist hand of law. Black and Brown alike suffer behind the racist criminal justice system, for starters. Statistics for both Latinos as well as Blacks are disproportionately high for the actual number of crimes that run rampant through all communities, when compared. This is so because the law continues old power differentials and is implemented by human beings who have been conditioned by the same society.

And because law begins as idea, and only becomes strapped with force when enough people agree on that idea.

One of the ways that unfortunate ideas become commonly accepted is by the use of emotional triggers to mislead thought and obscure the true machinations of state or corporate power.

It is necessary to deny the apparent binaries here.

1. This is not just a black/white issue. Take it from Chuck D. And for all of us who care, there is a way to channel the need to see justice done in the wake of this ugly moment. There are other peoples and communities who would greatly benefit from our consideration in the current context. People who would suffer in continued indignities and abuse were we to avoid using that lens in a broader sense. Other communities that are having their own dignity denied, with not just social pressure demanding they suborn themselves and produce papers for how they look (not white), but laws. Laws and actions, I'm sorry to say, that are supported very much by President Obama. Laws being snuck under the radar that increase the reach of the surveillance state, as well as that feed into the growing prison and detention industry in the U.S. Like the actions of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

I will be more specific on these both in a moment. But I wanted to prepare the soil of your imagination for this turn of thought. I invite you to explore these ideas:

--- The President, seemingly the unwilling subject of this degrading and dehumanizing shape of act before our eyes—being forced to show papers in the course of his day, with no reason but for the fact that he is not a pale man called Smith—supports that very idea being implemented for others who Appear Foreign, and is directly involved with making this a reality across America.

--- If it bothers me that he, as one person (and a very powerful one on the continuum considered) is subject to this, how can I engage the larger fight where millions are subjected to this? Millions of very vulnerable people. Not graduates of Ivy League schools; not powerful politicians with millions of dollars at their disposal, and millions of people clamoring to back them up.

2. This is not a struggle between Barack H. Obama and Donald Whatever Trump. Nor one between their persons or personalities. Sure, let us consider their power and from where their power derives, and what they use it for. Let us give context to the scene and the players. But we really don't need to make either of them a demon or a hero for us to successfully engage this important fight. In fact, doing so will dilute our powers of observation and thought.

3. The battle is not between the Evil, Rich, Racist Ole GOP and the Beleaguered, Liberal, Bullied, Righteous Democrats.If I may presume to know and say so, the battle at the heart of this outrage and hurt here, is for principles. For human dignity, and human rights. The battle is for integrity. The battle is against racist hate shaped into popular opinion and finally, given the force of the masses' will—be it in the shape of social pressure, law, violence, or all three.

Going forward, we must recognize the possible faultline that divides certain viewpoints rooted in the Black American experience from certain viewpoints in the Mexican American community, as well as in the Pro-Migrant community. Especially when exploited by the powers that be. We must dwell in our connectedness. It's not hard. I know I don't just care for Mexicanos. I care for all people who suffer behind the racist machinations afoot in the nation today.

4. It's not citizens vs. immigrants. Human rights, dignity, fairness: these are not things we should let legal terms determine. These are things we want human beings to have. Don't let the squirming exploiters and vampires at the top whisper to us the nightmarish myth of scarcity. Things only seem scarce when a small group of people need to capitalize on many people's energies and resources, and this profit-making pyramid shape enforces an artificial scarcity.

When we feel we cannot even take care of "our own," it's easy to let a feeling of solidarity slip away. It makes me sad when I see people of color who should understand and join in the struggle that Mexicanos and other immigrants face today, but who veer away from that struggle imagining that immigrants represent a threat to their own community. This is the voice of White Supremacy, and it's a bullhorn turned on all day and night in this land, so I understand. But when in all important ways our struggle is the same, "our own" can be an expansive thing—and these larger numbers will render us more powerful to fight those exploiters at the top, already unfairly given advantage.

Many of today's most important issues deal with power differentials between the very rich, and the rest of us. Immigration is one of the most important areas for us to mind. Many issues come together here. Drug war, Commerce, and the Economy. Lines of ownership; lines that signify an US and THEM, borders that we end up believing need small army units and millions of dollars of technology in guns, drones, and surveillance equipment to maintain their reality; their solidity.

In the issue of immigration and corporate abuse of borders and employees is revealed the secret of how towns and communities become economically destroyed by corporate powers being above the law, and exploiting the worker. In the selling of the idea that the only people affected are Criminal Illegal Alien Invader Types, the elite continue to exploit our vulnerable brothers and sisters.

In Immigration politics, we see the manipulative hand of Economics, and the fallout of Capitalism and Neoliberalism. Domestically as well as Internationally. Within this struggle are handholds to engage the struggle for working class rights, women's rights, family rights, culture, reproduction, human rights, our national ethics.

As more and more strife becomes about resources and mobility, more conquer and divide tactics will be put to work in this area of Immigration.

We must remember first and foremost (and again at the end), that the forces that benefit from our being divided will seek to exploit all these key areas. A simple lens adjustment would make that impossible. We must come to realize how many of us share this same struggle; fighting that power that reared its ugly naked head recently under the glow of sunlight bouncing off skyscraper windows, and hissed at the President with breath as old and rancid as years of gallows sweat.


TO PUT IT ANOTHER WAY

There are so many discussions about the Arc of Obama in the eye of popular opinion as of yet. We've all had an intense experience of some sort from Election Day until now, though our specific experiences may vary, and our current feelings vary just as much. Some have offered arguable reasons for becoming disenchanted with his administration. I will avoid the political laundry list, some or all of with which you may or may not agree. That's not the conversation(s) I am here for. I don't want to get sidetracked. I don't want to exploit or even risk the potential differences and faultlines in our unity just for a moment. And when I say "our unity," I mean working class people. I mean the 99% of income earners in the nation. I mean many many Black, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, Guatemalan, Dominican, Chinese, Korean or otherwise golden brown beautiful red black people. I mean white people. Here, I talk to all those people marginalized in some way by the powers and status quo that men like Donald Trump act in the service of.

I propose that what we have in common here is the idea of how wrong it is to deny the full dignity and rights to the Other in the name of safety and legal procedure. I suggest that this fight and furious sense of injustice cannot and should not end with the humiliating press conference, nor with the empowering roast of Trump at a dinner you and I had no means nor invitation to attend.


PROMISES, PROMISES

Candidate and President Barack Obama made some very specific promises to crowds of Latinos, in speeches to NCLR and to the immigrant community. He decried the ICE raids that tore parents away from their children, he called the system broken. In passioned speech, he told desperate immigrant families that he had their back. That he understood their pain. That he was determined to make a difference for them. He said he was an ally to Latinos and to Immigrants and that we could count on him.

He then turns around and continues the raids, but in other shapes. He deports more people than George W. Bush does, ensuring that many, many children are torn from their parents, after all. He does this in the name of Papers, not in the name of human rights or dignity.

President Obama and Janet Napolitano brag to the Republicans that they are deporting record numbers of undocumented immigrants. He turns his back on his own disabled aunt when the cold eye of ICE falls upon her. He sends troops to the US' Southern border, when the economic refugees flee conditions in Mexico that have been greatly caused by NAFTA policies (a Democratic accomplishment under Bill Clinton). Those people risking rape, murder, starvation, and poverty to cross the border to find a chance at life don't need bullets in their heads; they need help accessing resources so they don't need to flee their homes and families.

Obama's Department of Homeland Security offers a program called "Secure Communities" (S-Comm) that ties in the FBI and ICE to local police so that anyone apprehended by local police has all their info shared with these other agencies, even if a person is not convicted of anything. We've seen how successful Arizona's SB 1070 has been in disrupting society, and at driving a wedge between local police and many communities where people fear either being detained or simply being hassled based on ethnic signifiers. Many police have protested the implementation of S-Comm, understanding right away how it would harm their relationship with the immediate community and lend a hand to the proliferation of many crimes that would exploit this wedge. A few cities attempted to opt out of S-Comm, but voila! The cloak came off and Obama's DHS suddenly informed these cities that the program was not, after all, voluntary. Whoops.

Immigrant communities understand that they are being targeted when they are just trying to feed their kids and make a living, often exploited by workplaces that know they live without protection from law or society. But to console the rest who don't know this, Obama's White House claims it is only deporting serious criminals. The most cursory examination of reality shows this to be a complete falsehood.

One easy example of this is shown quite blatantly by how the White House is going after activist, friend, and law school student Prerna Lal. Prerna is a positive role model, an engaged, passionate person and organizer. Hardly a serious criminal. (Please sign the petition to help Prerna fight deportation.) Her crime? The creation and success of DreamActivist.org. Prerna was simply too successful in organizing students behind the DREAM Act, which—unlike these sly and disingenuous actions by the Department of Homeland Security—does exist in the service of human rights. We don't need to be frozen in the sixties to aid those fighting for communities before it becomes common sense to do so. We can look Prerna's way.

The stats tell the same story. The Obama administration is not deporting scores of dangerous criminals but people who have an old offense, or minor offenses, or who get caught up in the widening and growing web of "immigration enforcement," or who are simply students and children of immigrants and dared to make a valedictorian speech at their school, or reach out to help other people in the same plight. Sometimes they are simply driving home from work, and get pulled over by an old, white, sheriff who might as well be Donald Trump. They get asked for their birth certificate because their name sounds...un-American.


COME TOGETHER

It's so easy for us to stay firm in our personal experience and all the ways it feeds our own heart. One of the major premises in this article (or ramble depending on how you look at it) is that we proceed deeper and deeper into times when it will be important to not let ourselves be divided in the wrong ways. The Earth, mother of all, is increasingly poisoned and robbed...and those plunderers conspire to keep us misinformed about her condition. As she sickens in different ways, as our reckless, imbalanced, capitalist society veers drunkenly to and fro, as the divides grow starker and the ultra-rich more intoxicated by desperation, the powers that be will work harder and harder to keep us at each other's throats, to offer us others who we can throw to the curb in order to keep our own apparently threatened freedom.

We can feel empathy, kinship, or even an affection for the person named Barack Obama, for the challenges he faces navigating a system so strongly interwoven with racist currents, yet simultaneously see how today's policies enacted by the creepily-named Department of Homeland Security exist to grow the racist prison system, and aid racist behaviors and values through the normalization of certain laws.

We must shift our view of immigrants as Other. We must consider their fight our fight. They are, in fact, us—if we had less protection and more need for the help of the greater community. They are far closer to you and me than the President is, when it comes to struggle. They can be disappeared down a hole of legalisms and racist hate in a second flat...and you will not see them roasting the police a day later on national TV.

We need to feel simultaneously outraged by the racist mechanisms in society that demand documentation from President Obama simply because he is not white, as well as demand that he, too, do his part in eradicating those very mechanisms.

* * *

Final notes: Thanks to friend (and immigration lawyer) Dave Bennion for helping me with resources and to Melissa for posting the piece, which will be crossposted at The Unapologetic Mexican.

Please consider this a humble passing around of the socialist hat: If you are inclined and able to support my work on issues of race and immigration, paypal to dolaresATxolagrafikDOTcom (preferred method), or follow this link (will subtract a fee from donation).

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s powerful army on Thursday broke its silence about the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, acknowledging intelligence “shortcomings” in its own failure to find the terror mastermind but warning the United States against carrying out another such operation.

In a combative statement, a group of top generals known as the corps commanders said any similar U.S. raid would prompt Pakistan to review its military and intelligence cooperation with the United States.

Already, the statement said, the army had decided to reduce the number of U.S. military personnel in Pakistan “to the minimum essential.” That was an apparent reference to demands made in Washington two weeks ago by Pakistan’s spy chief, who asked for a drawdown in CIA personnel and U.S. special forces soldiers following the shooting of two Pakistanis by a CIA contractor.

Read full article >>

Pakistan's army, facing rare criticism at home after US forces killed Osama bin Laden in a raid, said it will review its intelligence and military cooperation with the United States if more unilateral attacks are conducted.

One of the most enduring themes of the Viet Nam era was that of the badly damaged Vietnam vet who came home and created mayhem – all because of his experiences and training.  It was a myth that died hard only because the war was so unpopular and so many people wanted to believe it.

BG Burkett in his book Stolen Valor, completely takes all the underlying premises that supported that myth apart with facts and statistics.  I don’t have time to relate them all but I cannot recommend that book highly enough.

That said, this article by Luke Mogelson in the New York Times Magazine (via PJ Tatler) entitled “The Beast In The Heart Of Every Fighting Man” is a travesty.  It’s subhead gives you a clue why:

The case against American soldiers accused of murdering Afghan civilians turns on the idea of a rogue unit. But what if the killings are a symptom of a deeper problem?

Instead of telling the story of the now infamous “kill squad” from the 5th Stryker Brigade out of Ft. Lewis WA, and the reasons for their actions and activities, Mogelson does what many hacks do and tries to conflate what happened in a single platoon out in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan with a problem that infects the entire military.

Granted – no, stipulated – war is hell, it changes people, it is something which anyone who has ever experienced it up close and personal would never wish on another person.  And yes, there are stresses that come from multiple deployments, leaving your family behind and watching men you think more of than anyone in the world die in action.  But those stresses aren’t unique to these wars.  Yes, multiple deployments are fairly unique.  But then the alternative is the duration – which my parents did in WWII – 4 years of war, from beginning to end.

But that’s not the point of the article.  Mogelson does a credible job of telling the “kill squad” story.  It’s a horrible story in which a deviant but charismatic junior leader, in an isolated outpost, talks some impressionable squad members into doing the unthinkable all while the weak leadership in charge of the platoon failed in their roles.

Had he left it here, I could actually find myself saying nice things about it. It is a story that must be told.

But he didn’t leave it there.  He started to veer in that old and predictable lane in which the military is indicted for making robot killers out of their charges and becoming so good at it that things like this happen.

In fact, just the treatment of the title outlines his attempt.  And interestingly, later on in the article, he uses the full quote from Gen. George C Marshall from which the line comes:

“Once an army is involved in war, there is a beast in every fighting man which begins tugging at its chains. And a good officer must learn early on how to keep the beast under control, both in his men and himself.”

Mogelson deals with the first part, but he makes absolutely no effort at all to understand the second part and how critical it is to the institution he attacks.  That is, “good officer[s]” and NCOs do keep control of it and they comprise the vast majority of the leadership in our military.  That’s why the military spends so much time and effort training them to do so.

Mogelson is reduced to using the Philippine insurrection and My Lai, two isolated examples decades apart as some sort of proof of his premise.  They are, instead, outliers.  As was Abu Ghraib.  There are always going to be bad people found in good institutions.  We see bad cops – but we don’t think all policemen are bad nor do we pretend that law enforcement as a whole deserves blanket condemnation.  We realize that with any organization of size which deals in a deadly business that there may be some bad people who we will have to weed out at some point or another.

However, Mogelson, via sociologist Stjepan Mestrovic, rejects that premise:

If we lack a sense of collective responsibility for these more recent war crimes, Mestrovic blames this on our readiness to believe that such occasional iniquities are aberrations perpetrated by a derelict few, rather than the inevitable result of institutional failures and, more generally, the nature of the conflicts in which we are engaged.

Institutional failures?  A military that fights the cleanest wars imaginable, does everything in its power to avoid collateral damage, demands that its leadership monitor and control that so-called “beast” by being totally involved and leading from the front.  A military that has fought like no other military has ever fought in history is an institutional failure?

Yeah, it was 40 years ago too according to these experts.  Except it wasn’t.

Welcome to my world of those long gone days of the Viet Nam era when exactly this sort of nonsense was written about Viet Nam and it’s vets.   And, if you read the comments to this story, you’ll find “mission accomplished” is appropriate:

These men and women return to abuse and often kill innocent people stateside. Their minds are permanently mangled.

The United States military is not protecting us but putting every US citizen in grave danger from the killing robots they have created..

END the military. We will all be safer.

And

In sum, the military's purpose in training young men and women is to twist, destroy, and pervert basic human decency, empathy and consideration of other human beings-- everything that most likely his or her family has also strived to cultivate in him or her-- in order to serve the aims of empire.

Thus, the military is essentially an evil institution.

The old meme is resurfacing and gaining some traction.  As I said way back then, “never again”. 

The military is both an honorable profession and a extraordinarily necessary one.  Its members are not “victims” of some evil institution.  They’re not robots.  They’re not “killing machines” who come home to “abuse and often kill innocent people stateside”.   The purpose of our military isn’t now nor has it ever been to “pervert basic human decency”.  It’s to do a necessary and often distasteful and dangerous job for the BENEFIT of those back home – for their safety and freedom.

Ironically the NYT publishes this garbage just after some hard men heroically risked their lives in a daring raid to kill a mass-murdering terrorist who struck the very city they print this in. 

This is the thanks they get.

~McQ

Click: one stop shopping for the AfPak Channel's coverage of the death of Osama bin Laden (FP).

Event notice: today at 6:30pm EST in New York, Peter Bergen will discuss what's next for al-Qaeda (Asia Society). The event will also be webcast.

No photos

After a "brief but intense" debate inside his administration, U.S. president Barack Obama has decided not to release the photos of slain al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's body or burial at sea, citing concerns that the images could be used to incite violence or as a propaganda tool (CBS, NYT, WSJ, Independent, CNN, Tel, AJE, Guardian, LAT, Times, AFP). CIA chief Leon Panetta said earlier in the week that the photos would eventually be made public, suggesting a split within the Obama administration, and Attorney General Eric Holder said he was concerned about possible revenge attacks (Post, WSJ, Post). A Pakistani security official who entered the Abbottabad compound where the U.S. Navy SEALs raid was carried out early Monday morning an hour after it occurred, however, sold several images to Reuters, showing three dead men, none of whom appear to be bin Laden (Reuters, McClatchy). The Reuters photos are available here (warning: very graphic). [[BREAK]]

Details continue to emerge about the Abbottabad compound and operation: property records reportedly show that the land on which the compound was built was purchased  between 2004 and 2005 by one of bin Laden's trusted couriers, who went by Arshad Khan, for $48,000, after administration officials assessed the value of the property at $1 million (AP, AP, ET, WSJ, Post, Tel); U.S. officials say bin Laden had 500 euros and telephone numbers sewn into his clothes when he was killed, suggesting he may have had plans for a quick getaway (ET, CBS, Times); and the raid may have been "one-sided, with a force of more than 20 Navy SEAL members quickly dispatching the handful of men protecting Bin Laden" (NYT, Post, Reuters). Several stories also profile the SEAL Team Six, the secretive elite force which carried out the operation and has now returned to the U.S., and Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, the leader of the military's Joint Special Operations Command (NYT, AP, Post, ABC).

The Pakistani military has taken charge of the investigation into how bin Laden was able to hide in plain sight, detaining 11 people (NYT). Indonesian officials say Umar Patek, a top terrorist suspect who was arrested in Abbottabad earlier this year, was planning to meet with bin Laden (AP).

Pakistan in the hot seat

Pakistan faces increasingly strident questioning over its stated ignorance of bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad, a military garrison town around 40 miles from the capital of Islamabad, as Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani claimed the intelligence failure was made by "the whole world, not just Pakistan alone" (NYT, FT, CNN). The reputation of the Pakistani Army, usually considered the most effective institution in the country, has been called into question as Pakistani politicians and journalists demand explanations and an inquiry, and U.S. and European intelligence officials are becoming more convinced that current or retired Pakistani officials provided some kind of aid to bin Laden (Post, NYT, AFP, Reuters, WSJ). The Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami is urging its followers to protest Pakistan's relationship with the United States tomorrow (Reuters).

Pakistan's foreign secretary, Salman Bashir, warned the U.S. this morning of "disastrous consequences" if it carries out any more unauthorized raids on Pakistani territory (AP, ET/Reuters, Dawn). The Pakistani military has been publicly silent, though Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has reportedly been holding regular meetings with his top commanders (UPI, ET, NYT, Dawn). Chris Allbritton and Mark Hosenball have a must-read investigation into the long history of mistrust between Pakistani and American intelligence, and Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman describe how U.S. officials thought over the years that bin Laden was ensconced in Pakistan's tribal regions (Reuters, AP).

A few more stories round out the bin Laden news today: the FT reports on how much the U.S. has spent on national security since the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001 (FT); the NYT and Guardian investigate the canine component of the Navy SEAL team that carried out the Abbottabad raid, and the NYT reports on tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan (NYT, Guardian, NYT); and the LA Times writes that U.S. officials say the harsh interrogation of detainee Hassan Ghul in a Polish prison in early 2004 provided a clue about the identity of bin Laden's courier (LAT).

Non-bin Laden news

Afghanistan's attorney general's office said it had arrested a translator for U.S. forces on allegations of taking bribes to help set up contracts with the U.S. (AP). A motorcycle bomb injured eight civilians in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad (Pajhwok). And some 2,000 protesters in north Kabul demonstrated against Afghan president Hamid Karzai's overtures to the Taliban, at a rally with former Afghan intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh and former presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah (AP). Bonus read: Peter Bergen on can we win in Afghanistan? (TNR).

In Pakistan, a school was blown up in the northwestern district of Nowshera, and schools remain closed in South Waziristan (ET, ET).  

Twitter records

Twitter announced that the hour in which Obama spoke on Sunday night to announce the death of bin Laden saw 12.4 million tweets sent (CNN, Tech Crunch, CSM). Between 10:45pm EST on Sunday night and 2:20am on Monday morning, Twitter users sent around 3,000 tweets per second.

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Some Pakistani military leaders had to know where Osama bin Laden was hiding, and the United States should make clear to Pakistan's army and intelligence chiefs that it expects full and direct cooperation in hunting down terrorism and Taliban suspects in exchange for the financial aid Pakistan is receiving.

Moneycontrol.com

Pakistan Warns US Against Future Unilateral Military Action Voice of America Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir addresses a news conference at the Foreign Office in Islamabad, Pakistan, May 5, 2011. Pakistani Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir on Thursday lashed out at the United States for not consulting his government ... Pakistan army orders cut in US military personnelThe Associated Press Pakistan army says to review U.S. cooperation if more raidsReuters Pakistan warns America not to stage any more raidsFox News Seattle Post Intelligencer -Indian Express -New York Times all 1,882 news articles »

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan's army threatened on Thursday to review cooperation with the United States if it conducted more raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden.

via Dan Lewis of Now I Know.

Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roche Gilbert du Motier, better known as the Marquis de Lafayette, was a French nobleman who famously served as a major general for the Continental Army in the American Revolution. Lafayette was integral to France's support of American troops in the war as well.

These contributions did not go unacknowledged; roughly two dozen states have towns named after him amongst a host of other honors. But the most impressive acknowledgement came on December 28, 1784 -- roughly a year after the American Revolution officially ended under the Treaty of Paris. On that date, the state of Maryland passed a resolution, making Lafayette a "natural born citizen" of the state. The resolution also did the same for all of Lafayette's male heirs, extending to and beyond the present day.

In 1919, the New York Times (pdf of article here) concluded that this designation is likely unconstitutional under our present framework -- as the power to define "natural born citizen" resides with Congress, per Article I Section 8 Clause 4 of the U.S. Constitution. But, as the Times notes, Maryland's grant of citizenship to Lafayette and his heirs predates the Constitution, and comes from a time when states were empowered to define who was a citizen.

Why is Lafayette's designation as a "natural born citizen" notable? Because Article II Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution states, in part "[n]o person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President[.]"

Lafayette's male heirs -- whomever and wherever they may be -- have met the first prong required to be eligible to be President of the United States, in a manner unique to them.

That a dozy hilltop town, home to the Sandhurst of Pakistan, was also home to Osama bin Laden should not surprise anyone. What is surprising is why all those clever analysts sitting in London and Washington don’t really understand (or pretend not to understand) the reality of the Pakistan-American relationship.

First the capture: It makes sense that bin Laden was found in Pakistan. If every significant Al Qaeda capture has taken place in that country, then why not this one? Al Qaeda operates in Pakistan with a degree of ease that it does not enjoy in other countries. And there are good reasons for this, which start and end with the country’s army.

It also makes sense that bin Laden was living close to the military. It’s no secret that he is admired among large sections of the general population. What matters more is that this includes a small number of influential officials in the military, in military intelligence and in the nuclear apparatus. The numbers are likely small: but powerful enough to provide the Al Qaeda founder with a base in a part of the country where you don’t get to live in a military-run housing complex unless you have the right connections.

It is too early to say what the terms of bin Laden’s residence would have been. One likely scenario may have been a form of house arrest, similar to that experienced by Pakistan’s disgraced nuclear scientist A Q Khan: another hero who enjoys top-level support from within military intelligence, but is persona non grata abroad. Except that there is scant evidence of security, or soldiers at the time of the raid. It is more likely that bin Laden was a guest and not an inmate.

The discovery of bin Laden’s Abbotabad lair should at least dispel two myths. Myth number one is that Pakistan’s army does not, as David Cameron claims, look both ways. It only looks one way: and that is in the direction of its own national security. Myth number two: there is one country that the Pakistani military genuinely fears; genuinely believes is a threat to its security and its state religion. That country, more than India, is America.

Pakistan is a faith-based state. It was created largely for people of one faith. Its constitution says that laws must be based on religion. If a man or woman applies to join the army of such a state, they will have signed a covenant that says: We are the citizens of an Islamic state. If any country or individual threatens either our families, or our faith, then we are prepared to die defending both. India in the eyes of the military threatens Pakistan’s borders, but largely because of a shared history that goes back centuries, there is no deep ideological conflict between the two countries. America, on the other hand, is seen by the military to threaten, both the country’s borders, but also its state religion. It doesn’t matter how many times President Obama says that there is no war on Islam. None of the Pakistani soldiers fighting alongside those of the US believes this.

Bearing this in mind, one critical feature of western foreign policy now looks incredibly naïve at best; at worst, a disaster. This was the courting of Pervez Musharraf. General Musharraf is about the last ally the west needed in its war on terror. He promised the kind of support to the US that was practically impossible for his country to deliver. But when someone puts a suitcase containing billions of dollars of free money on your desk, and asks in exchange for the Moon, you are not going to immediately turn it away.

If America wants Pakistan on side; if it wants to see a stable Pakistan that is not a haven for terrorists and that doesn’t export terrorism, then it needs to recognise that it (America) is the elephant in the room. It is not merely an observer; but a player, and a player whose military presence in the country is having a heavily destabilising effect.

If President Obama genuinely wants to help that country, then he needs to convince his defence establishment to keep out of the country’s affairs for at least a generation. Keeping out of Pakistan’s affairs is not the same as withdrawal, Somalia-style. America could adopt a more intelligent engagement. The US could build as many schools as it can afford to and there will still be more to build. It could run high-tech hospitals, create elite universities and send plane-loads of American Muslims to speak at Islamic conferences. But what it absolutely must do is keep away from security and governance.

That is of course easier said than done. Why? Because there are huge vested interests which will be threatened on both sides.

The US military is the world’s most powerful. There is an argument that it needs to be able to interfere in the affairs of other nations at the very least to maintain spending at current levels. The Pakistani military, too, has a disproportionate amount of influence in society. As in Egypt, as in Indonesia before the fall of Suharto; like Turkey before Erdogan, it is not only a fighting force, but a state within a state. It has tentacles reaching into all sectors and all levels of society. It runs factories, hospitals, schools and universities. It has an investment arm and its own philanthropic foundation. It has its own real-estate division that parcels out land and housing to military families and those who can claim connections.

But both the US and Pakistan need to decide what is more important: is it more important to keep their soldiers busy fighting wars that mess up the rest of the world. Or is it more important to think intelligently and decide on a course of action that could benefit everyone.

Barack Obama has shown that he can pull a trigger when needed. He has earned the title of Commander in Chief. Now more than ever he needs to use the rest of his famously professorial brain and save us all from the American and Pakistani hawks who would like to suck us all into their war games.

Days after al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by US special operatives, Pakistan has warned against raids by foreign countries in the region. Pakistan foreign secretary Salman Bashir has said that any such raids would face military reaction. Dawn reports:

“We feel that that sort of misadventure or miscalculation would result in a terrible catastrophe. There should be no doubt Pakistan has adequate capacity to ensure its own defence.”

These statements were aimed at U.S. and India, The Times of India reports:

"Any other country that would ever act (similarly) on the assumption that it has the might ... will find it has made a basic miscalculation.

We see a lot of bravado in our region... from the military, air force, which state that this can be repeated. We feel that sort of misadventure or miscalculation will result in a catastrophe."

In a statement yesterday, Pakistan's Minister for information and broadcasting, Dr.Firdous Ashiq Awan speaking on behalf of the government had expressed its disappointment with U.S. on how it handled the killing of bin Laden.

We have officially expressed our deep concern and reservations on the manner in which the government of the United States carried out this operation without prior information or authorization of the Government of Pakistan.

We have also officially stated that this event of unauthorized unilateral action cannot be taken as a rule. Nor could such an event serve as a future precedent by any state, including the United States.

Such unilateral actions could undermine cooperation and may also, some time, constitute a threat to international peace and security.

Meanwhile Pakistan's army chief is meeting with his top commanders to discuss the attack on the compound in Abbottabad which led to the killing of bin Laden. Pakistan maintains that it did not participate in the attack on bin Laden in any way and didn't know of the attack. Both the U.S. and Pakistan have stated that the helicopters took off from Afghanistan.

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Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Pakistani Religious Group Burns American Flag And Pays Homage To Bin Laden
• India Had Warned The U.S. That Bin Laden Was Hiding Close To Islamabad
• VIDEO: This Is The Inside Of Osama Bin Laden's Mansion

Buenos Dios amigos y bienvenidos a tus Thursday Skull Session. It's Cinco de Mayo, and depending on your perspective it's either an inoccuous statement of the date or an obscure Mexican holiday that Americans use as an excuse to drink gallons of Jose Cuervo. I, for one, plan on imbibing a Corona or two in honor of our southern brothers. After all, it's not often Mexicans can trade war stories with Germans about the utter incompetence of the French. 

For those less familiar with the holiday, Cinco de Mayo celebrates the victory of Mexico over the French in the 1860s. Sadly, the French went on to steamroll the Mexican army and place a puppet ruler in charge. In another example of the utter absurdity that was European politics, the French invaded Mexico to recoup debt by installing a relative of the Austrian Archduke as the Emperor of Mexico. Like the Holy Roman Empire, the Empire of Mexico wasn't much of an Empire. Once the U.S. got it's shit in shape and ended the Civil War, General Grant re-asserted the good old Monroe Doctrine and helped kick the French out, in an example of one of the few times the U.S. actually helped Mexico. On a somewhat unrelated note, Ulysses S. Grant was a badass. 

Anyway, enough with the history lesson. Today's theme is The Other Blogs, what do they say? Who do they fancy? Why are people reading them and not us? What do sportsfans think about Kate Middleton's dress? Was Barack Obama's Birth Certificate Bin Laden's last Horcrux?

Wait, what? Our first stop on the BlogoTour is LandLoyalty, a blog about Cleveland sports. Writer Tim Ertle thinks the Buckeyes lack of marquee names the last two drafts will come back to haunt them. With only one player drafted in the first two rounds over the last couple of years, Mr. Ertle thinks players may begin to question Tressel's ability to develop players. 

Now, there's little doubt that a school's ability to put players in the league is a recruiting advantage, and Ohio State hasn't had the number of draft hits it had in the middle of last decade, but I think it's a little premature to think the lustre is off the program. Besides, although I'm skeptical that Ohio State is twice as good at developing talent as Florida, hadn't we already determined Tressel was one of the elite?

What Distractions? Adam Rittenberg over at ESPN released his list of the top teams in the B1G coming out of spring. Banking on a heavy dose of Dave, Rittenberg expects the Buckeyes to lay the lumber on defense and hold onto the ball on offense to try and coast through the first five games:

Quarterback is certainly a concern for the first five games, but Ohio State likely will be able to survive, thanks to the run game, defense and special teams -- classic TresselBall.

Can't argue with that.

As for the rest of the teams, Rittenberg mostly sees a redux of 2010, with the notable exception of Iowa. Considering the heavy losses on defense and the graduation of All-American Hero Ricky Stanzi, that's not a bad bet. Whether Michigan can pull itself out of the gutter with their newly refurbished offense will go a long way toward determining the rest of the conference.

Got your back, coach. The O-Zone interviewed Doug Worthington concerning his thoughts on the Tat-5 situation, and what should come as no surprise, the big man thinks Tressel did what he thought was right. There are certainly questions surrounding the FBI investigation and it's role in leading Tressel to withhold information, but by and large it's broadly understood that the Cicero e-mails largely disabuse anyone of that notion. The O-Zone, putting Worthington's comments into perspective:

If Tressel was indeed afraid for his players, his fears were realized in December when Ohio State received a letter from the United States Department of Justice outlining the involvement of as many as 10 players—past and present—with Rife.

 

Even then, Tressel chose not to come forward with what he had already known for eight months. It wouldn’t be until after the Sugar Bowl win over Arkansas that Ohio State officials uncovered the email exchanges with Cicero, but none of Tressel’s actions to this day have changed anything in the eyes of Worthington.

While it's not surprising to see former players support their coach, it's still comforting. It's unlikely that Tressel is a mercenary conman who only looks out for #1 if all of his former crew constantly and consistently vouch for his character. Say what you will, but I respect a coach who screws up supporting his players more than a coach who screws up supporting only himself. 

Why so serious? Peter Bean over at Burnt Orange Nation brings the indignation over the Boise State situation. For those who haven't heard, Boise State has been issued allegations of a 'lack of institutional control.' That is essentially the worst possible violation a school can commit. However, said violations included, among other things, a recruit sleeping on a player's couch. With total misconduct totalling only $5,000, most of which were minor (including a $2.34 charge), there has been much scratching of heads. In addition, the Tennis coach commited an especially serious violation that will likely lead to that program undergoing heavy sanctions.

Peter Bean:

Boise State committed a handful of ticky-tack violations, the like of which Ohio State has self-reported by the dozens over the years (as has every other school on the planet), and the NCAA -- in conjunction with one major violation -- concluded, "This might be a lack of institutional control."

Think that through to its logical conclusion.  On the one hand, you have a rogue tennis coach, trying to slip one by... well, no one, because no one is paying attention to Boise State tennis. Or any other tennis program, for that matter. On the flipside, we have Jim Tressel, who was trying to slip unquestionably ineligible players into... the Fiesta Bowl.

Now, I'm no lawyer (yet), but in what way does Boise State's culpability in various NCAA infractions reflect on Ohio State? While I understand Peter's reaction to the NCAA's seemingly absurd allegations with respect to the BSU football program, that has nothing to do with the eligibility of the Tat-5. The NCAA had full knowledge of the extent of the Tat-5's violations, and rendered their verdict with that knowledge in mind. It's done. Kaput. Over. There is nothing more to be said about Terrelle Pryor, Solomon Thomas, Dan Herron, Mike Adams, and Deveir Posey. The question left unresolved deals exlusively with Jim Tressel and his withholding of information.

That said, a lack of institutional control deals with the athletic department, not just the coaching staff of a specific sport. Whether Jim Tressel is a lying, cheating, piece of human excrement is immaterial. If Boise State's athletic department knowingly allowed a non-collegiate player to suit up (something that, one would assume, the university should certainly know about considering you have to, you know, register for classes and everyting), that's a far cry from a coach lying to his athletic department about violations. 

Regardless, pointing to Ohio State and saying "They were worse!" is not a particularly interesting argument at this point, especially when comparing apples and oranges.

ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistan’s army chief is meeting with top commanders to discuss the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Both Pakistan and the United States have said that Islamabad was not involved in the helicopter-borne raid. Bin Laden was killed on Monday in a large house close to a military academy in

Date: May 5th 2011 4:11p.m.
Contributed by: lisa_gay

The whole world is talking about Bin Laden's death. No matter how happy Americans or how sad the precious metal investors are, to most Chinese, it's the perfect chance for some gossip.

According to an online vote at a popular BBS, only 4.28 percent of Chinese feel joy at the news of Laden’s death. Over 30 percent of netizens say they don't feel affected at all.

Although the Chinese media pays attention to the big news and some Chinese are following the Bin Laden story, the masses have a rather flippant attitude about it. People are joking around and jeering this global news, of course, with “Chinese characteristics”.

Some of the funniest jibes:

After watching Jiang Wen’s film Let The Bullets Fly, Obama got inspired: He'll announce to the world that Bin Laden has been killed by the American army so that the real Laden becomes a substitute.

Bin Laden said during his lifetime, “China is the only country we can’t provoke! We dispatched five terrorists to China in the span of six months, but all failed. One was asked to bomb the overpass, but he lost his way. The second was going to bomb a bus, but he wasn't able to get on the bus. The third planted a bomb at a supermarket, but the bomb was stolen. The fourth was asked to destroy the train, but he wasn't able to buy a train ticket. The last terrorist successfully bombed a coal mine, but there wasn't any report about it on the local media, so the poor guy was killed for telling a lie. ”

When hearing that United States would throw Laden’s body into the ocean, the Japanese started to worry that Laden’s body would become ...

The reputation of the army, the most powerful and privileged force in Pakistan, has been severely undermined by the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden, raising profound questions about its credibility from people at home and from benefactors abroad, including the United States.

The Parliament’s Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee is due to report today on the implementation of legislation to ban cluster munitions.

While a delay in Australia passing the legislation has been attacked by lobby groups and figures like Malcolm Fraser as being subservient to United States interests, this could not be further from the truth.

The reality is that the only interests the government is interested in protecting are those of our men and women in uniform while being careful to uphold the principles of this important convention.

The legislation in its current form would risk Australian troops serving overseas being prosecuted for carrying out their duties, even if they did not personally employ cluster munitions or endorse their use.

Yet this isn’t to say that the Government does not also believe that cluster munitions are one of the world’s greatest evils. They are and the figures speak for themselves. Cluster munitions are indiscriminate bombs dropped from an aircraft that contain a cartridge of smaller bombs designed to disperse over a large area destroying critical installations like runways and bridges. They are highly unreliable and a third do not explode on impact but remain dangerously strewn across the landscapes of countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Kosovo and Chechnya.

Laos alone has between nine and 27 million unexploded sub-munitions which the Red Cross estimates has killed or injured around 11,000 civilians. This includes three million children, many of whom inquisitively sought them out given their tragic similarity in appearance to an Easter egg.

Given this, it is hardly surprising that the government worked hard to help deliver the 2008 International Convention on the Banning of Cluster Munitions. This outlawed not only their use and possession but any assistance provided to countries not satisfying these two criteria. Some, like Fraser, have rightly described this as “the most significant disarmament and humanitarian treaty negotiated in more than a decade”.

The foreign minister at the time, Stephen Smith, not only played a pivotal role at the negotiations in Dublin, he also made the 16,000 kilometre venture to snowy Oslo for the elaborate signing ceremony as a signal of our commitment to the treaty.

Since then 53 states have ratified the document and a further 55 have signed it. The United States, Russia, China and Israel who manufacture and store a majority of the world’s cluster munitions continue to hold out alongside India, Pakistan and Brazil. Others, like Australia, have sought to amend it to better protect its soldiers from prosecution.

Critics of Australia’s actions, like Human Rights Watch, have said the legislation in its new form would “essentially allow Australian military personnel to load and aim the gun, so long as they did not pull the trigger”.

While a literal reading of the text may contend as much, this flagrantly disregards the moral turpitude of our forces to act according to the spirit of the convention and in accordance with basic principles of human decency.

Independent MP Andrew Wilkie, a former army and intelligence officer, has rightly pointed out that “there are any number of scenarios where we might brush up against the use of cluster munitions”.

Such instances would include if a troop commander called in air strike as part of target identification or protection that then involved cluster munitions without his knowledge; or if a soldier was to refuel a truck carrying cluster munitions as part of our supply chain, or indeed provide air traffic control to an offending aircraft.

The possibility of a United States military base in Australia, as floated by the Prime Minister this month, would also see innumerable instances of inconsequential moral interaction with cluster munitions by our forces in the lines of logistical coordination that would forge.

Finding the right balance between our irreproachable commitment to banning cluster munitions and protecting the interests of our troops will take time. And we should be patient. It took several years for the Howard Government to ratify the instruments of the International Criminal Court as a similar debate waged. By 2002 it was satisfied it had the necessary protections in place.

Ultimately we must remain committed to the eradication of cluster munitions from this world. They are in nobody’s interests. But in doing so we should be careful to ensure the men and women serving our nation are able to do their job in making this world a safer place without fear from unintended prosecution.

Thom Woodroofe is a foreign affairs analyst who has studied both international humanitarian law and air power.

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Pre-summit talks held in conciliatory tones as row over wind turbine subsidies shows conflicts remain

China has tried to defuse a trade row with the US over wind technology, as the two states moved towards a newly co-operative stance on a range of issues before a summit in Washington.

Officials in Beijing said they were willing to discuss incentives for turbine manufacturers, which the Obama administration described as "illegal subsidies" in a request for talks on the subject at the World Trade Organisation.

The US claims China has given an unfair advantage to domestic companies by channelling hundreds of millions of dollars to them through a special fund established in 2008. The United Steelworkers union is frustrated that this weakens the competitiveness of US firms such as General Electric in a Chinese market that has doubled in size almost every year since 2005 and is now the biggest in the world in terms of generating capacity.

Beijing insists its wind policies are good for the global environment and within trade rules, but was conciliatory. "China will conscientiously study the US request for consultations, and will deal with this in accordance with WTO dispute settlement rules, while retaining our corresponding rights," the Chinese commerce ministry said.

Government advisers were, however, scathing. Professor Pan Jiahua, of the sustainable development research centre at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the symbolic impact is significant. "At a global level, the US action is terrible. This gives a very bad signal for the world. It says renewable energy technologies should not be encouraged."

Despite this spat, the US and China closed the year on a positive note on many fronts – including trade, military ties, climate change and global security – as they prepared for their presidents' second summit on 19 January. Obama visited China in November 2009.

After a tense year during which US officials, including Barack Obama, openly criticised China, and their Chinese counterparts returned the favour, there was a sudden switch in tone from the US. Instead of portraying China as protectionist or as an "enabler" of North Korea's provocations, US officials were praising China, referring to it again as a responsible partner.

In part, the improved tone reflects Washington's success in leveraging Beijing's desire for a smooth summit to get concessions from China or nudge it toward policies closer to Washington's liking. That said, significant problems bedevil the relationship between the world's sole superpower and a surging counterpart that is both partner and rival. "You've got leaders in the US and in China that want to do everything possible to limit direct confrontation," said Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm, "but structurally, both countries are going to have a hard time avoiding it."

Administration officials commended China for soft-pedaling a proposal to hold emergency talks among South and North Korea, China, Russia, Japan and the US as part of a way to calm the tension in the region. Instead, the officials said China had accepted a US plan that put improving ties between the South and the North ahead of any multilateral talks on the North's nuclear weapons programme.

President Hu Jintao plans to highlight the positive aspects of China's ties with the US. Among other summit events, he is expected to visit a Chinese-owned car parts plant and a joint US-China clean-energy project. China is also considering a request to hold a joint news conference with Obama, something Hu rarely does.

All year, US and Chinese officials have bickered over economic issues, specifically access to China's markets and China's unwillingness to allow the yuan to appreciate against the dollar. But again the tone has shifted. When the US-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade wrapped up a meeting in Washington on 15 December, US officials hailed China's co-operation. China said it would open new technology and agriculture markets for US products and would toughen enforcement of intellectual property and software piracy laws.

There's been another U-turn on military relations. China froze those ties in January, after the administration announced plans to sell Taiwan $6.4bn in weapons. Throughout the year, Chinese officers criticised the US.

But on 13 December under-secretary of defence Michele Flournoy met General Ma Xiaotian, deputy chief of the general staff of the People's Liberation Army, and Flournoy was full of praise for her Chinese counterpart. She said that shegave Ma and his entourage the same briefings on the US nuclear, ballistic missile and space postures "that we gave our closest allies".