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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33269 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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I have a hard time imagining Obama saying "I will not have this day of triumph be overshadowed by some fucking technical failure. Make the bodies go away, I don't care how."

Not to get all conspiracy theory but it needn't be a decision Obama made, or was even aware of. Besides, Obama etc. were quite happy to set up the whole photoshoot in the Situation Room like this was some Aaron Sorkin scripted movie about The West Wing: Independence Day.

The bin Laden raid was every bit as much about propaganda as anything else, and "some of our elite force were killed by these miserable stumblebums" is not the image the originators want portrayed. "We dropped on them like the wrathful hammer of Thor, obliterated them, and came away without even a scratch" is the message of power, influence, superiority, and 'we can get you wherever you are and not even break a sweat' to be publicised. See the nonsense about what happened bin Laden's body or who exactly shot him:

After the raid, reports at the time stated that U.S. forces had taken Bin Laden's body to Afghanistan for positive identification, then buried it at sea, in accordance with Islamic law, within 24 hours of his death. Subsequent reporting has called this account into question—citing, for example, the absence of evidence that there was an imam on board the USS Carl Vinson, where the burial was said to have taken place. On 15 June 2011, U.S. federal prosecutors officially dropped all criminal charges against Bin Laden.

Dropping the charges is another symbolic piece of theatre, whatever the legal requirements; there are all kinds of objectives to be fulfilled in an incident like this beyond the merely literal.

It was widely reported by the press that Bin Laden was fatally wounded by Robert J. O'Neill; however, it has also been widely discredited by witnesses, who claim that Bin Laden was possibly already dead by the time O'Neill arrived, having been injured by an anonymous SEAL Team Six member referred to under the pseudonym "Red". According to Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette, Bin Laden was struck by two suppressed shots to the side of the head from around ten feet away after leaning out of his bedroom doorway to survey Bissonnette and a point man. Once the Navy SEALs entered the bedroom, his body began convulsing and Bissonnette along with another SEAL responded by firing multiple shots into his chest.

"Yes, they killed our leader but we took vengeance by killing some of them" is not the comfort you want your enemies to take away, you want to make sure that there isn't anything that can be used to build up the mythos:

Pakistani authorities later demolished the compound in February 2012 to prevent it from becoming a neo-Islamist shrine.

Pakistani civilians in Abottobad reported that several Navy SEALS were killed during the Bin Laden raid when their Blackhawk crashed, and that they saw bodies and body parts being loaded onto another helicopter for evacuation. A few weeks later, a helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, killing about half of the exact same SEAL team that were on the Bin Laden raid.

Even worse would be "Yeah, they killed themselves by a screw-up". But yes, the parsimonious explanation is that "if you're a soldier, your chances of dying are higher, especially if you're flying around on different high-level dangerous missions".

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