The Guy Who Unknowingly 'Live-Blogged' the Bin Laden Raid 142
netbuzz (955038) writes "Three years ago today, software consultant Sohaib Athar was working on his laptop at home in Pakistan when he tweeted: 'Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).' And then: 'A huge window-shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope it's not the start of something nasty :-S.' It was for Osama bin Laden. Today Athar says, 'People do bring it up every now and then.'"
Re:"Three years ago today" (Score:5, Interesting)
The man who effectively declared war on the USA by murdering 1/50th the amount of 'innocent' civilians as the USA did in Japan 66 years prior.
I really, really, hate people who point to the atomic bombings as proof that America is evil. The only way you can even remotely make that claim is by ignoring every reality of war and by using your modern knowledge of how things *did* happen to damn those who had to make the decision without the benefit of knowing how it turns out.
Believe it or not, there are often things that are justifiable in a war that would otherwise be unthinkable.
War - total war, on the scale of nations - is a constant question of choosing the lesser evil. There are very rarely good options to take - if there were, there would not have been a war in the first place.
We haven't had a war like that since WW2, so I suppose it's excusable that people forget just how much death and destruction it causes. The numbers can be a bit hard to wrap your head around, after all.
The two atomic bombings killed a quarter million people. On its own, that's horrifying. In the context of the Second World War, that's a rounding error. Some countries were literally decimated - over ten percent of their prewar population dead. Compared to Germany, Japan got off light.
Let's look at the alternative to the A-bombs. Japan was not going to surrender - even after losing Manchuria to the Soviets, they were still ready to fight. So we were looking at an invasion - and after Iwo Jima, we knew it would not be an easy fight. Estimated Allied killed were in the hundreds of thousands to millions - Japanese casualties, military and civilian, are incalculable, particularly since the plans that did not involve nuclear weapons generally involved chemical weapons in their stead. Some plans involved both, on top of the more mundane horrors of a million-man invasion force. Oh, and if you delay it too long, the Soviets will probably invade, and they barely cared about their own casualties, much less enemy noncombatants.
There *was* no good option there. Japan was going to get pounded. The least evil option was whichever one ended the war fastest - and that option is using whatever weapons you have available to force your opponent to surrender. If that means firebombing cities, so be it. If that means atomic bombs, so be it. Because if you hold back, all you're doing is making the war last longer, which means not only do more of your own people die, but in the long run, more of theirs do too.
There are plenty of justifiable ways to claim that America is evil - pretty much anything done in the past decade counts, really. You don't need to make shit up about the atomic bombings in order to wedge it into an unrelated argument.
PS: Hiroshima was a major military city during 1945, with both a major command center, as well as a supply hub and munitions stockpile. Nagasaki was a major munitions industrial center. Calling them "innocent civilians" is at best misinformed.
Re:All these Traitors you have (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, yeah, sort of [wikipedia.org].
Critics, including Saddam's legal counsel Khalil al-Dulaimi, alleged that American officials had a heavy influence on the court.[55] In a statement, Khalil said, "this court is a creature of the US military occupation, and the Iraqi court is just a tool and rubber stamp of the invaders."[56]
Khalil al-Dulaimi and various international commentators alleged that the date on which the verdict was read live to the world, 5 November 2006, was deliberately selected by the Bush Administration in order to influence the US midterm elections which occurred two days later. This has been called a November Surprise.[56][57] The verdict was expected to be on 16 October 2006, but was postponed to consider recalling some of the witnesses.[58] Even as the verdict was released verbally on 5 November, the written, final verdict was not released until days later.[59]
It is perhaps not very suprising that the defense in the case made such objections. But it hardly stops there:
The Washington Post reported that "Americans have drafted most of the statutes under which Hussein and his associates are being tried". It also reported that "A US official in Baghdad confirmed last weekend that only the United States and Britain had contributed experts to advise the court on how to prosecute governments for war crimes and other such matters".[60]
The human rights organization Amnesty International criticized the death sentence and said the trial was "deeply flawed and unfair." The process was marred by "serious flaws that call into question the capacity of the tribunal," Malcolm Stuart, director of Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa program, said. "In particular, political interference undermined the independence and impartiality of the court." [61] The specific concerns raised by Amnesty International included the status of the trial as a "Special Trial" (unconstitutional according to the Iraqi Constitution), political interference in trial proceedings by the removal of a judge mid-trial, exclusion of members of the defense team at points in the trial, assassination of multiple members of the defence team, and the closure of the trial before the defence team had completed presenting its legal case.
In the opening statement of the Jury of Conscience of the World Tribunal on Iraq, keynote speaker Arundhati Roy retorted, "Saddam Hussein is being tried as a war criminal even as we speak. But what about those who helped to install him in power, who armed him, who supported him—and who are now setting up a tribunal to try him and absolve themselves completely?"[62]
The Ayn Rand Institute argued that "A trial that presumes Hussein's innocence can achieve nothing but a travesty of justice": "Saddam Hussein is not a private citizen, whose guilt requires proof in an objective court of law, but a dictator whose incontestable evil was manifest to any rational observer of his tyranny."[63]