• paul in kirkland

    Just fyi — looks like your rss feed is getting cut off, or is possibly an excerpt? Just thought I’d let you know.

    • http://blurbomat.com blurb

      I’m testing excerpts to see how they appear in various apps. Thanks for letting me know you saw an excerpt! I hope it was intelligible.

  • http://profiles.google.com/cmckinnon1 Carrie McKinnon

    I can’t believe they just “buried him at sea”. I mean, I get it, they wanted to supposedly respect muslim burial traditions, by burying him within 24 hours, but Islam does not condone Sea Burial.

    This taken from Wikipedia:

    “The sacred texts of Islam prefer burial on land, “so deep that its smell does not come out and the beasts of prey do not dig it out”. However, if a person dies at sea and it is not possible to bring the body back to land before decay, burial at sea is allowed. A weight is tied to the feet of the body, and the body is lowered into the water. This would preferably occur in an area where the remains are not immediately eaten by scavengers”

    Ugh. I feel kind of jerked around. But that is me, having always had my doubts that Bin Laden was really the threat he was made out to be for the American people. i,e, still alive, the mastermind behind 9/11, a true enemy to the US government…UGH again.

    • http://blurbomat.com blurb

      Jerked around? How so? Three U.S. Presidents have fought or battled Bin Laden and his terrorist group starting with President Clinton. Bin Laden is a symbolic victory. It does not end much of anything other than perhaps the decade-long period of grief and horror the U.S. has felt. It also is a symbolic victory in this regard: Obama pushed for this. He got it. It took patience and will.

  • http://www.sugarleg.com sugarleg

    I do agree that sea burial was not favorite, but he was a man without a country. I do also agree that this is a very important symbolic victory, but would like to see the energy channeled into resolve for ending the wars not more military sacrifice on our part, money spent included. would be lying though if I did not admit that I am happy the last thing he heard were American voices and the last thing he saw was a big ol’ American bullet.

  • http://profiles.google.com/cmckinnon1 Carrie McKinnon

    I get it that this is a symbolic victory and I am not disputing the grief, horror, heartache or pain he caused the American people. But there is also a lot of skepticism around the legitimacy of US motives for waging a “war on terror” in the first place.

    I feel jerked around precisely because it has been a decade and billions of dollars and so many lives lost in the pursuit of this guy and then he is caught and yeah finally…no wait, we buried him at sea. I don’t really know what I would expect them to do with the body, but after so long of questioning our own government for supposedly not being able to find him, I just assumed that he probably worked for them and that is why they would never catch him.

    This morning’s news was good news no doubt. Not ‘I am going to fist pump and celebrate’ good news, but ‘good to know we can finally say he is gone and have some closure’ kind of good.

    Seeing then that the body has already been disposed of…well I felt jerked around. As sick as this sounds…maybe pictures will help. Maybe I am so distrustful of the news that I need proof and I feel like they fed that proof to the fish. I never doubted the technological savyness or the military expertise and capabilities of the American government to catch this guy. What made me doubt was more that they supposedly didn’t and couldn’t catch him for THIS LONG. So, then disposing of the body just seems like carte blanche to tell us whatever the hell they want to about this.

    (bit of a tangent coming but I think it is relevant)
    I am American, living in a Muslim country for three years now, just experienced my second (and hopefully last) terrorist attack. Marrakesh, which we (foreigners and locals) have been incredibly proud of here in Morocco had a bomb that at first they said was a suicide bomb and now know it was detonated at a distance (which somehow made it feel even worse) that killed 15 people and wounded many more in a VERY popular tourist area and particularly in a cafe that I could have been sitting in with my children, that all of my friends as well as my in laws have and do visit regularly. Why am I telling you all this?

    I guess it’s to say that terrorism and the psychological effects of it are very fresh in my mind. Al Quaida, Bin Laden, horrible senseless death of innocent people are very much in context right now for me. And even still I find myself repulsed at people celebrating anyone’s death in the streets. I was sickened by Sadam’s hanging and this whole ordeal is pretty gruesome as well. And I HATE HATE HATE Al Quaida and their sick cowardly tactics that really do terrorize people. But still, all of these things don’t make me unquestionably ingest the news. Any of it…Anywhere. And when I say I feel jerked around, I guess I am speaking to ALL OF THE NEWS COVERAGE THAT WE CAN’T TRUST to report an unbiased truth, example: the comparably different reports that we got here in North Africa on the protests in the Arab world and the US news coverage…

    I am also speaking of the huge huge fear my family and friends were experiencing for my and my family’s safety in the middle of that while things here were just business as usual (with some protests that were way exaggerated) coupled with a nasty local media campaign. And now the crazy fear that I all of a sudden feel for myself and my family and the total lack of news coverage…or I guess the insignificance of it on a world wide scale. Because terrorism takes over your entire sense of security and safety and well being, it is designed to reach much further than the human lives it actually obliterates in the actions.

    I just feel a bit jerked around by everyone I guess…hmmm…guess I’ll stop there. I don’t have a tidy ending for my diatribe. Take it as reflection on living through this crap!

    • http://blurbomat.com blurb

      Thanks for taking the time to share this. I can’t imagine what you’ve been through. I don’t often hear of these things except through television, websites, etc. so your personal account is more meaningful.

      I’ve got a longer post ruminating about what I feel around this event, but I’ve had some medical tests getting in the way of writing time.

      I’m not trying to pick a fight with this next bit, I’m just trying to understand. Isn’t one of the tenets of Muslim burial that the body has to be buried quickly? I’m no expert, but while a land burial is preferred, according to Wikipedia, there is a tradition for burial at sea:

      http://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​B​u​r​i​a​l​_​a​t​_​s​e​a​#Islam

      Given that Bid Laden was a man without a country, burial at sea seems the most prudent… I imagine that the ship was not going to reach land (and I’m guessing here as well) within the preferred time limit, they did what they felt best.

      I’m sure in the coming days, we’ll learn more about this raid. To be sure, there will be repercussions, both good and bad. One of the biggest parts of my disbelief is amazement that this kind of mission was conceived and executed at all. Imagine a bombing campaign to eliminate Bin Laden… the human cost would be even greater.

  • http://profiles.google.com/cmckinnon1 Carrie McKinnon

    Well…according to the Wiki thing which is about as far as either one of our knowledge goes on this, it does appear that burial at sea is an acceptable way to bury a Muslim body.

    I guess my questioning of all of this was already there, has been there for a long time and like I said above, I don’t know what I would have expected them to do with the body. It just seems that so much effort went into finding this guy and then when finally FINALLY they did, his body has now been disposed of. I don’t know if I would have expected them to keep the body frozen or what the heck…but for me it reinforces doubt that Bin Laden was the true enemy of the state he was made out to be. It also reinforces doubt that he hasn’t been dead for a long time now.

    They just got rid of the evidence SO quickly so I feel that now we will really never know the truth unless we just trust what they have told us is the truth. And if we look at history and CIA operations from the past that have now come to light then I think we have really good cause to question if what the government tells us and how they tell us something happened is really how it happened. And when I said that I feel jerked around by the news that he was buried at sea, it is precisely connected to my distrust of my government and their covert ops at home and all over the world. This is also exagerrated by the part of me that really doesn’t beleive that it would take them that long. that the world is that big, that Afghanistan or Pakistan is really thhat rugged or whatever that it would be that hard to find the guy.

    I am not convinced either way…just have my doubts. It feels like a movie. 9/11 (not a movie feeling a HUGE dramatic event that changed the world),
    George Bush and his politics of cruelty, Saddam hiding under a rock and being publicly hung, Afghanistan for THIS long, that fact that Bin laden was a former fighter for the US in Afghanistan and therefore trained by our government, fast forward to this rebellion all over the Muslim world where only the richest of the richest countries effectively suppressed their uprising. No one knows where those protests really started and the way that it was exploited on television left ALOT of people with questions. And now…“we caught Bin Laden”, “there is no place for al Qaida in the new Arab democracies” blah blah blah…it just goes together so well.

    Maybe it’s all really the truth and sometimes life just plays out crazier than any film you could even imagine…but maybe there is a much larger agenda involving very limited natural resources and very strategic geographic areas.

    In closing:
    My husband is Muslim and we have a mixed nationality mixed religion mixed perspective household. We left America to give our kids a taste of the rest of the world, to be a part of the rest of the world for a bit, and golly gee, are we getting our money’s worth. The north African uprisings are so close you can feel it. People here were so scared and so protective of their king and of their land and we really thought we made it through and then BAM — bombing in Marrakesh, no one has claimed it yet, no one knows, people are questioning EVERYTHING, there are cops (that usually don’t carry any guns) with machine guns standing at every entrance into our city. I just feel so affected by everything. But that could be my over empathizing…

    I am a huge fan of you and your wife. I have enjoyed for years watching your family and your success grow and I don’t want to fight either.

    And for the record, I was so so so happy that Obama got to announce it, that he gets the street cred for this one. This is not an attack on him…god knows he has done his part to make it a bit easier, almost cool to be an American living abroad again. Everyone loves Obama outside of America. And I am so honored that I got to be a part of voting for him and that our country is a place that would elect someone, with Hussein as his middle name into office after the years of the Bush Administration. That shit doesn’t happen in the rest of the world and it makes me proud of my country and all of our contradictions. And this doesn’t even speak to what I feel about him as an individual, a leader, an intellectual, a real person.

    • http://twitter.com/BeckyCochrane BeckyCochrane

      I’m enjoying reading your perspective. And it’s nice to hear from an American living abroad what I hear from a lot of the people I know online who are citizens of other countries: People elsewhere seem to generally like and respect Obama.

      I think many of us, even someone like me (right or wrong, I’m not all that cynical about politics), have been bombarded or manipulated with so much misinformation or contrived information for so long that we don’t know what to believe or trust. My own personal feeling–with absolutely no foundation in fact, just my brain–is that this operation happened pretty much the way it’s been presented, but that Bin Laden’s body was quickly and respectfully buried somewhere undisclosed so that the grave couldn’t become a focal point for anyone who might want to use its location politically.

      I’m relieved this part of the last ten years is over.