Osama bin Laden buried at sea after being killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan

Osama bin Laden buried at sea after being killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/?wpisrc=al_national&reload=true

Excerpt: Osama bin Laden, the long-hunted al-Qaeda leader and chief architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, was killed by U.S. forces Sunday in what officials described as a surgical raid on his luxury hideout in Pakistan. In a rare Sunday night address from the East Room of the White House, President Obama said a small team of U.S. personnel attacked a compound Sunday in Pakistan’s Abbottabad Valley, where bin Laden had been hiding since at least last summer. During a firefight, the U.S. team killed bin Laden, 54, and took custody of his body in what Obama called “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaeda.”

My thoughts:

• This is more significant, Mr. President, than the American military throwing the Taliban out of Afghanistan in months, against all the the predictions of the Left and the media?

• All honor to the CIA, which usually gets more blame than credit because we usually only hear about their efforts when they go wrong, and to our superb Navy SEALS.

• A happy day, celebration is appropriate, but Jihadist terrorism is not dead. We are fighting a hydra, not a single snake. Some of those celebrating twenty-somethings might want to line up at a recruiting office. A beer and a cheer are easy. Parris Island, Ranger School or SEAL training is very tough.

• If the Jihadists are unable to launch retaliatory strikes, it will bode well for how the war Bush launched on Jihadist terrorists has gone.

• Hamas has condemned the raid. Maybe this will give Americans a better understanding of what Israel faces—and of Hamas-linked groups in the US, like CAIR.

• This may be the first thing since 2008 that Obama doesn’t blame on Bush. Will Obama have the class to give Bush some credit? It would be gracious and good politics, but infuriate the haters who make up his base.

• This will give Obama ten-point bump in the polls, but that will subside as economic reality grinds back on the public.

Reports are that this was accomplished due to intelligence developed from interrogations of terrorists at Gitmo. Gee, suppose it had been closed back when every leftist, from Obama on down, in the blame-America-first crowd was calling for it to be shut down. Do you suppose they will now apologize to George Bush?

• But credit to the Obama administration for keeping the wraps on the secret until the raid was pulled off.

• Think of the lives that would have been saved had Clinton not choked on his chances to get bin Laden in the 1990s.

• It must pain Obama to hear the media referring to this as a victory in the “war on terror,” after all his efforts to not offend murderers by calling it a war. And to see Fox News, at least, playing the clip of Bush promising that we would get bin Laden.

• When did some of the media start spelling it “Usama” instead of “Osama”?

• There will be at least three books from members of the raiding team on the shelves in a month.

• There are tens of thousands of phonies claiming to have been SEALs in Vietnam, or in SOG on secret missions in North Vietnam, or to have the Medal of Honor and other awards they didn’t earn. In the future, thousands of phonies will claim they were on this raid.