Terry, to your point about proving his involvement....they sure got it to stick for ol' Charlie Manson!
As for video (mentioned a couple of pages ago), there definitely was. Infact they have reported that in the situation room the inner circle watched the whole thing unfold.
From a societal stand point it was the wrong thing to do...having said that I don't mourn it for a second.
I guess it all depends from which side you view the argument....it's all about perspective.
Dennis
G'Day Dennis, you're right about Manson, but he was tried "back in the day" when the rules of evidence often bowed to public opinion, and society was happy not to ask questions as long as the government kept the streets safe. Nowadays it would be a lot tougher to convict him using the argument that he incited his followers to commit murder.
We'll have to assume that there was a live video feed of the op going down, as none of us here will ever see it, not that they couldn't just edit out the footage of Osama and his son getting iced in front of his other children, and his body being examined to determine that it was the real deal before being loaded on to the Blackhawk etc. Of course, the shocked looks on the faces of Obama and Hillary might have been just file footage of them looking at their personal ratings over the last two years, before this political godsend, of course.
As far as being "The wrong thing to do", I disagree. Osama had it coming and killing him was justified, considering what he'd done. He wouldn't have been too unhappy either, he was suffering from a debilitating disease which took him out of the front line and his relevance in the organisation was little more than that of spiritual leader, not field general. To die in combat would have been a dream come true for him, and he's now officially a martyr, which kicks arse in the muslim suburbs in heaven, apparently.
While I think the op was more slapstick than surgical, and the seal team 6 boys were lucky they didn't get their arses handed to them after losing any initiative that they might have had once their helicopter crashed on insertion, (what is it with helicopters failing on special operations missions anyway, remember the Iran Embassy fiasco?) there was more good news than there was bad, so for the US government's "spin doctors", it was a complete success.
It probably won't make much difference in the overall scheme of world terrorism, and I wouldn't be planning an overseas vacation for awhile, but it was a moral victory for the families of the victims of all of Osama's attacks, so that's a good thing. Cheers, Terry.
