5/1

Bin Laden dead, we're told. Supposedly killed by "a U.S. military asset" in mansion outside Islamabad; body in our possession. (CNN.)

... Most informative updating I've seen is at the Atlantic (not Sullivan, oddly).

11:10 p.m. May 1st is eight years to the day from President Bush's famed announcement of the end of major combat operations in Iraq while standing before a "Mission Accomplished" banner.

11:06 p.m. CNN is reporting that Osama bin Laden was killed in a mansion outside of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

Updated 11:02 p.m. CNN is reporting that the United States now has the body of Osama bin Laden. The news was first reported by Jill Jackson of CBS News and by the chief of staff to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

That last is rather an odd note. Who's our military working for?

... CNN says it's told op wasn't a Predator strike. Pakistani ISI telling CNN it cooperated in the op.

... OBL was actually in Abbottabad (named after Major James Abbott of the British Army), some ways north of Islamabad and close to Kashmir. What was he doing there -- had he been making prior visits that led to his being tipped off? Was he http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifplanning something with Kashmiri terrorists?

... Abottabad compound built in 2005; property worth $1M but no internet/TV, residents burned trash rather than putting on curb; things like this attracted attention. Obama said to've approved the hit Friday morning while royal wedding going on. Helicopter raid by Navy Seals, took 40 minutes.

I'm a little tired of the "huh, he wasn't in a cave!" reaction. I doubt he was living there permanently, and obviously he was more likely to be hit when traveling outside the NW Province. But who the hell knows, maybe he's been there for years.

... Fox reports as a fact (no "sources say") that Obama just lied to the world:

The architect of the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil was killed a week ago inside Pakistan by a U.S. bomb.

Nice.

... Glenn Reynolds picked a bad moment to be a jackass:

Carter blew it with Iran, encouraging the Iranian armed forces to stay in their barracks, while Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's radical Islamists (whom Carter thought of as "reformers") took power, and then approved the ill-conchttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifeived hostage rescue mission that ended with ignominious failure in the desert. Obama, by contrast, could only wish for such success.

April 30. "Wingnut FAIL," says one commenter.

... It *is* beginning to seem that OBL was hiding out there for some time, which contradicts my thought and Bergen's suspicion about the Predators' influence:

This home, U.S. intelligence analysts concluded, was "custom built to hide someone of significance."http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Besides the two brothers, the U.S. "soon learned that a third family lived there, whose size and makeup of family we believed to match those we believed would be with bin Laden. Our best information was that bin Laden was there with his youngest wife."

The same report says that Osama's body will be handled according to Islamic law, which is prudent. (Buried at sea, says WaPo?)

... Okay, OBL dead or not I still hafta get up at 5:30, so I'll leave with this.