White House now admits only one bad guy shot a gun in bin Laden house, there was no firefight

A friend of mine just messaged me: "How do you f--- up the PR around KILLING OSAMA BIN LADEN????"

Yesterday I wrote about my concern that the White House story on killing Osama bin Laden kept changing.  First he had a gun, then he didn't, first he grabbed a woman as a human shield, then he didn't. First they shot him twice in the head, then they didn't.

And now we find out that the extended firefight wasn't a firefight at all.  The only shots fired were from a courier at the beginning of the raid.  Osama didn't have a gun like we were told he did.  But now we learn that there was a rifle within reach...

He's the biggest freaking terrorist in the world.  And one of the biggest mass murderers of all time.  You really don't need to scrape for details to justify killing him.

Sigh.

Everyone is happy the man is dead.  No one begrudges the Seals for going in with guns blazing.  God bless for them the amazing job they did.  But what is the deal with the White House's ongoing mistakes with the information surrounding this mission?  Why does it take four days to get the truth from a small group of US troops?  (And what is the truth anymore?  I don't know what to trust now.)  Why is the White House putting out details that are ending up untrue, details they should have had clear from the beginning, such as, was there a firefight or not? Was bin Laden shot twice in the head or not? Did he pull a gun on them or not? Did he grab a woman as a shield or not?

This is being handled in an incredibly amateur way.  It makes the White House look bad.  It makes all of us look bad.  One assumes the part about the dead guy being bin Laden is still true, but the rest of the story?  Who knows at this point.

Biggest f'g story of this administration, and probably since 9/11 itself.  Knock some heads and get it right.

To reiterate what my friend said: How do you f-up the PR around killing Osama bin Laden? Read the rest of this post...

Sony admits personal data for another 25 million was lost

Personal responsibility somehow is always limited to individuals. Why do politicians demand responsibility from people - usually those most in need - but the corporations get a pass? This is yet another headache (possibly much worse) for consumers but at least this time the shafting has not been done by the banks. The Guardian:

The crisis at Sony deepened on Tuesday as it admitted that an extra 25 million customers who played games on its Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) PC games network have had their personal details stolen – and that they were taken before the theft of 77 million peoples' details on the PlayStation Network (PSN).

The electronics giant said the names, addresses, emails, birth dates, phone numbers and other information from PC games customers were stolen from its servers as well as an "outdated database" from 2007 which contained details of around 23,400 people outside the US. That includes 10,700 direct debit records for customers in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, Sony said.

The dataset was stolen on 16 and 17 April, before the PSN break-in, which occurred from 17 to 19 April. Sony said that it had not previously thought that the data was copied by the hackers who broke into its systems.

Read the rest of this post...

Company run by ex-GOP Gov. of ME (husband of Olympia Snowe), facing lawsuit backed by DOJ

This sure sounds pretty sleazy, in addition to being illegal. And, it's your tax dollars at work:

The U.S. Justice Department, 11 states and the District of Columbia are backing an employee whistleblower lawsuit against Education Management Corp. (EDMC), a company once run by former Maine Governor John McKernan. McKernan continues to serve as Chairman of the Board of Directors. He also is the husband of Senator Olympia Snowe (R - Maine).

The complaint alleges that the for-profit college chain was illegally paying recruiters based on the number of students they could sign up. EDMC allegedly based recruiter salaries on their sales abilities and also gave recruiters prizes, including expensive trips, based on their ability to bring students in. Federal law bans for-profit colleges that accept federal aid from compensating employees based on their ability to recruit students. Harry Litman, an attorney for the two former employees who are serving as whistleblowers in this case, said EDMC's violations were obvious.

"It did it flagrantly," Litman said. "It did it for many years. It lied to the federal government about it. And [employee incentives] fueled their explosive growth to $2.5 billion a year, almost all of which is taxpayer money."

If this proves to be true, I sure hope DOJ is going to get the money back -- even if that means suing McKernan and his wife for all of their assets. Instead, he'll probably get a pardon. Read the rest of this post...

Reuters gets photos of some of the dead at bin Laden's house

Not OBL, it appears, but some of his henchmen.  Reuters is confident they're real.  (I'm not posting them because A) some will find them gross, and B) they belong to Reuters. You can click through safely, the first pics aren't of the dead.) Read the rest of this post...

The NRA's homophobia

For an organization that claims to be single-issue focused (and claims to be a civil rights organization, believe it or not), there's an awful lot of homophobia coming out of gun-central in the past few weeks.  We detail the bigotry over on AMERICAblog Gay. Read the rest of this post...

Increasingly difficult to explain how Pakistan didn't know where bin Laden was

From the Economist:

Nobody reports seeing other visitors, official-looking or otherwise, coming to number 25. A nearby hospital could perhaps have been useful for a man, such as Mr bin Laden, who suffered from kidney disease. Pakistan's main military academy—the country’s Sandhurst or West Point—is only short distance away on foot. Local residents say that police regularly swept the area, roughly once a week, checking residents' IDs and sometimes looking inside homes. It is hard to believe that this house could have escaped scrutiny for long. Most embarrassing for Pakistan's most powerful man, General Ashfaq Kayani, the chief of staff, is that he was just across the field from number 25 just last week, boasting at the military academy that Pakistan had broken the back of terrorism. At the time Mr bin Laden was within shouting distance of the general. That looks increasingly difficult to explain.

Read the rest of this post...

Torture didn't deliver bin Laden

First, McJoan quotes Rummy:

Dick Cheney said today that “it wouldn’t be surprising” the intel came from Bush’s torture program. However, there is currently no evidence to suggest that the detainees that provided the information that led to bin Laden were subject to torture. And Bush Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who presumably has some knowledge about what went on at Gitmo, today threw some cold water on this theory:

"The United States Department of Defense did not do waterboarding for interrogation purposes to anyone. It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantanamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding."

Marcy Wheeler at FDL:

From these dates we can conclude that either KSM shielded the courier’s identity entirely until close to 2007, or he told his interrogators that there was a courier who might be protecting bin Laden early in his detention but they were never able to force him to give the courier’s true name or his location, at least not until three or four years after the waterboarding of KSM ended. That’s either a sign of the rank incompetence of KSM’s interrogators (that is, that they missed the significance of a courier protecting OBL), or a sign he was able to withstand whatever treatment they used with him.

Andrew Sullivan:

What really broke the case? From the NYT:

Operation Cannonball, a [2005] bureaucratic reshuffling ... placed more C.I.A. case officers on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan. With more agents in the field, the C.I.A. finally got the courier’s family name. With that, they turned to one of their greatest investigative tools — the National Security Agency began intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the man’s family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his full name. Last July, Pakistani agents working for the C.I.A. spotted him driving his vehicle near Peshawar.

Old-fashioned, painstaking, labor-intensive intelligence work. The American way. We never needed to stoop to bin Laden's standards to get bin Laden. We needed merely to follow our long-tested humane procedures.

Read the rest of this post...

Clemons: bin Laden's death & burial photos should both be released; NYT says Obama says "no"

Steve Clemons makes an excellent point. We should release the photo of Osama dead, but also release the photos of his body being prepared, by Muslim rites, for burial at sea. If we're willing to be that civilized with our mortal enemies... It's a good point.

Here's Steve on MSNBC making the argument.


CBS says Obama is now saying he won't release the death photo (though that doesn't mean he can't or won't change his mind - "no" rarely means "no" with this President). I tend to agree with Steve. I think people need closure. I think I do. I think it's important to show the world that the "terrorist who was 10 feet tall" really wasn't. As for the notion that this will put the troops in danger, newsflash: the troops already are in danger. Al Qaeda already wants to kill both them and us. More generally, do I think a photo of Osama dead might enrage a few extreme Muslims, sure. And might it show a lot of other Muslims that the guy wasn't all that, you bet. I'm just not sure we can game this that well.

NYT is writing about this now as well, saying Obama won't release the photos.  If he won't release the gruesome photos he should at least release the ones of Osama's body being prepared for burial under Muslim rites, and make sure you include a photo where you can see Osama himself, and avoid a gory one.  There's a huge PR benefit to that.

Now here's an interesting ditty, from the CBS article, where a House Republican committee chair seems to be equating our troops with Osama:

Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said Wednesday that the Obama administration should not release the gruesome post-mortem images, saying it could complicate the job for American troops overseas. Rogers told CBS News he has seen a post-mortem photo.

"Imagine how the American people would react if Al Qaeda killed one of our troops or military leaders, and put photos of the body on the internet," he continued. "Osama bin Laden is not a trophy - he is dead and let's now focus on continuing the fight until Al Qaida has been eliminated."

First thing, Osama bin Laden is not the moral equivalent of an American soldier, thank you very much. Second, I'm not convinced that Al Qaeda will base its future actions on how we treat Osama's photo. I think they're going to treat our troops like garbage, regardless. They're terrorists who blow up innocent children in airplanes, and Congressman Rogers thinks they're going to suddenly act like gentlemen if only we return the favor? Read the rest of this post...

Rachel on Osama and money: "The goal of Al Qaeda was to bleed America to the point of bankruptcy"

Fascinating. Rachel Maddow has a "Who was Osama?" report that's eye-opening. Not that any of this is new, but little of it is reported in this, the Tom Clancy phase of the bin Laden termination story.

Put differently, we want to be watching an action movie, so that's what we're fed. But in fact we've been watching a very clever heist all the time — one where the perp got the mark to rob himself blind. And thus we're blind.

Maddow's report:



"According to bin Laden, the goal of Al Qaeda was to bleed America to the point of bankruptcy. That was his grand strategy" (6:35 in the clip).

She titles her report "On Our Terms, Not His". On his terms, we lost, right? After all, isn't that what the Reagan of our myths did to the old Soviet Union — get them to spend themselves into bankruptcy?

Food for thought, though I don't hold out hope for our digesting it. The real predators feeding on our decline — the military-security industry — are feasting. They're unlikely to allow the process of decay to stop until the last drinkable drop has passed their lips. And we're unlikely to stop them.

GP Read the rest of this post...

John Ashcroft is Blackwater's new ethics chief

Seriously.  From WIRED:

The consortium in charge of restructuring the world’s most infamous private security firm just added a new chief in charge of keeping the company on the straight and narrow. Yes, John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, is now an “independent director” of Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater.

First order of business? Cover up all those nude statues. Read the rest of this post...

Arctic ice melting at faster rate than projected

Now that Washington is full of climate change deniers, problems like this will go nowhere. If it was January, they'd be making jokes about the weather again in their home town. Classy people, those new Republicans. Clever too. Al Jazeera:

The study released on Tuesday by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) said there is a "need for greater urgency" in fighting global warming as record temperatures have led to the increased rate of melting.

The AMAP report said the correspondending rise in water levels will directly threaten low-lying coastal areas such as Florida and Bangladesh, but would also affect islands and cities from London to Shanghai. The report says it will also increase the cost of rebuilding tsunami barriers in Japan.

"The past six years (until 2010) have been the warmest period ever recorded in the Arctic," said the report.

"In the future, global sea level is projected to rise by 0.9 metres to 1.6 metres by 2100 and the loss of ice from Arctic glaciers, ice caps and the Greenland ice sheet will make a substantial contribution," it added.

Read the rest of this post...

Obama got a bin Laden bounce according to NYT/CBS poll

The President did get a bounce from the bin Laden news, according to the NYT/CBS poll. NYT's Jim Dao and Dalia Sussman give us the numbers and the analysis:

Support for President Obama has risen sharply following the killing of Osama bin Laden by American military forces in Pakistan, with a majority now approving of his overall job performance, as well as his handling of foreign policy, the war in Afghanistan and the threat of terrorism, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

The glow of national pride seemed to rise above partisan politics, as support for the president rose significantly among both Republicans and independents. In all, 57 percent said they now approved of the president’s job performance, up from 46 percent last month.

Hasn't been that high for a long time. And, it probably won't last.

Americans still aren't happy about Obama's leadership on the economy:

But in an indication that anxieties about unemployment, gas prices and the national debt have not withered with Bin Laden’s death, goodwill toward Mr. Obama did not extend to his economic policies. More than half said they disapproved of his handling of the economy, similar to the result last month, the poll found.

So, good job on Osama. Get some results on the economy, especially jobs. Read the rest of this post...

WikiLeaks: US troops were stationed few hundred yards from bin Laden's compound

Besides a high ranking Pakistani officer living 50 yards away, we're now also discovering that US troops had been stationed at the military academy a few years ago. It's really time to close the chapter on US military involvement in that region. Besides not being able to afford it, bin Laden is dead so let's move on and quit throwing good money after bad. It was ridiculous enough to keep spending money with the corrupt Afghan government and now it's increasingly clear that any money spent with Pakistan is a waste as well.

If Washington is eager to cut spending for middle class needs in the US to help fund this, there's something fundamentally wrong with the system. The Guardian:

US forces were stationed just a few hundred yards from Osama Bin Laden's Abbottabad compound in October 2008, according to reports within the WikiLeaks embassy cables.

The revelation that US forces were so close to the world's most wanted man in 2008 comes after material from the Guantánamo files suggested the US may have received the intelligence that led them to Bin Laden as early as 2008.

The US soldiers were due to perform a routine posting "training the trainers" of Pakistan's 70,000-strong federal military unit, the Frontier Corps.

Read the rest of this post...

UN could bring "crimes against humanity" charges in Libya

The ICC could find itself very busy throughout north Africa and the Middle East in the coming months. Al Jazeera:

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) says he has unearthed "enough evidence" to pursue up to five warrants for crimes against humanity committed by forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo made the announcement on Tuesday, a day before he was to brief the UN Security Council on his investigation into alleged crimes commited by Gaddafi's forces.

Gaddafi's forces have been battling rebels who are seeking to end the Libyan leader's more than 40-year rule. The fighting has resulted in human misery and led to allegations of excesses being committed against civilians.

Read the rest of this post...

Portugal finalizes bailout deal with EU and IMF

Spain has been quiet on this front for a while and surely many are hoping that it stays that way. As for Portugal, it will be interesting to see how the country moves forward since the bailout terms remain unpopular, as do both of the primary political parties. Moving forward is going to be a challenge in these circumstances.

A government official told Associated Press that the €78bn package included aid for Portugal's cash-strapped banks. The Público newspaper reported austerity measures would include cuts to some, higher-scale state pensions. Basic pension rates and the minimum wage would stay in place as would free schooling and health services, the newspaper reported. The retirement age would not be changed, it added.

Sócrates insisted that the bailout package required the country to carry out the same austerity measures rejected in parliament by the opposition centre-right social democrats, who are currently ahead in the opinion polls.

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