Bin Laden might have been a bad guy ... but the way his life and death have been used have been dishonest.
-Washington's Blog
And in a previous post, quoting a Christian Science Monitor article, George makes the very valid point that by allegedly assassinating and quickly disposing of the body at sea (too quickly to have conducted a DNA test btw), we lost out on the invaluable opportunity to debrief/torture/coerce a false confession out of the world's former most wanted man, a man who allegedly ran what is arguably history's most dangerous terror organization (not counting its parent organization, the CIA).
The opportunity to glean valuable intelligence from the leader of a powerful terrorist organization was lost, says retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who interrogated generals under the command of Saddam Hussein and evaluated US detention operations at Guantánamo.
It is a misconception that ideologues don’t talk, he says. “The opinion that, ‘Oh, he’s such a fanatic, he won’t tell us anything' – that’s uninformed blathering by people who don’t understand the business,” Herrington adds. “The experience with those who worked with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and some of the other most senior terrorists is that they are narcissists and that they do want to talk – and talk and talk.”
The key, Herrington says, is to “channel those long talking sessions where they begin to – inadvertently at first – reveal things that are useful. All the while he’s talking, he’s telling us things that he doesn’t think are important, but they are.”
-Christian Science Monitor
Increasingly, it is becoming crystal clear that IF bin Laden was still alive in that mansion in Abbottabad, the mission was indeed to silence him, not to bring him to any kind of justice.
And before you offer up any of the "keeping him alive would've riled up the terrorists" idiocy, realize that murdering him in cold blood in front of his wife and then dumping his body into the Arabian Sea was a pretty infuriating chain of events as well.
