sean said:
I never said he was murdered. assassination has a different meaning, like a desire to acquire fame or notoriety (that is, a psychological need to garner personal public recognition). Say as to bring up your presidential ratings with proof that he is dead instead of just leaving a smoldering hole. We killed Gaddafi's son and three grandsons as collateral just to disrupt his regime, were we really that worried about casualties of Osamas family we could not just bomb the compound.
Assassination is one of the oldest tools of political power. It referred to the Nizari branch of the Ismā'īlī Shia founded by the Persian Hassan aṣ-Ṣabbaḥ during the Middle Ages. The group killed members of the Muslim Abbasid, Seljuq, and Christian Crusader élite for political and religious reasons.
Since he was the head of a religious group and once controlled a country, throw in he was hiding or being hidden on sovereign soil outside of the war zone it seems like a fitting word. Does this set a precedent that now we can go into any country "unilaterally" and "provoke a shoot out" with anybody we term a enemy? If it was anybody else other than the most hated man in America would you call it? If it was Assange in Belgium would it still be a legitimate mission if we deemed him a threat and put a bounty on his head. Who he was should not play a part in how we conduct ourselves as a nation.
Yes ROE, you haven't seen it affect anything? Terrorist can hide in a mosque and shoot our guys but we can't return fire or risk damaging the structure. We have implemented some screwy engagement policies on both war fronts. The russians didn't handle anything PC and still could not win in Afghanistan how are we supposed to is we play by a very strict set of rules that help the enemy. All I'm saying if we can do this in a friendly country why can't we really get down to business in the war zones.
I see the UN is questioning it, they should be told to go fuck themselves, the only people that have a right are the American citizens and we want to know and see the twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.
Continuing the semantical debate since I'm stuck on a boat in the Atlantic with precious little else to do:-You did use murder, in the definition you ascribed to assassination, and thus my rejection of it contextually.-The murky origins you point toward also include the original Assassin's not being a nation-state, working for any side as a matter of covienience, etc. All important factors when you start conflating that term with what our Armed Forces just did.
-Which religious group was UBL the head of? Al Qaida is a militant islamic group-defined by most as a terrorist group-that ascribes to the Salafi school of Sunni Islam, or if you want to argue semantics and really piss them off, the Takfiri school. UBL was not the head of that school of Islam. Nor was he in charge of any country that I'm aware of, if you mean Afghanistan you are doing not doing justice to the Talib and Mullah Omar.
-The mitigating arguement you throw out with Assange is a distractor, so I won't address it.
-ROE are a fact of life, you learn to work within in them. Having been shot at by a mosque (actually having been shot at from mosque(s)) before I can tell you that ROE has an effect-but not much of one, and so does what weapon systems you have, whether you can id the source of fire, etc..it's just a factor-and an M1A1 main gun round works pretty well when the combatant that is using that facility has rendered its protected status irrelevant. The term terrorist isn't something we use very often on the ground, it sounds better on Fox News, as I don't recall running into any terrorist-though I have sat down with plenty of Al-Qaida guys who were insurgents.
-Screwy policies are enacted by the elected leadership-sadly very few of them have any experience with the pointy end of things, so what do you really expect?
-I still offer to you that the American people, as citizens of a Democratic Republic, do not have a right to see everything-there is no need for transparency in such things-if they don't like it, that's what the Freedom of Information Act is all about.