AP UPDATE - Osama bin Laden was unarmed when the US commandos shot and killed him.
AP UPDATE 2 - Only one person in the house was armed and shot at the special forces team, while 5 were killed. [Maybe the reason the government won't release the video is because they know it will look like more of a cold-blooded assassination than an actual battle.]
Two night ago I was down at Hotel 1000 with the fellow my Startup Weekend comrades at Madrona, which I must say was an amazing weekend with the great CityMat.ch team and Arianna did a nice write-up on our team as well. We went downstairs to the bar when Obama started giving his speech about how Osama bin Laden was killed by US strike team. Talk about a heavy weekend, everyone was kind of stunned. We had just finished a 54 hour startup-a-thon, with 15 companies being pitched and launched, and instead of being able to wind-down, we were all caught by a small piece of history.
Yesterday, I saw in the newspapers that people were celebrating by waving American flags in DC and other areas and chanting and cheering and Facebook blew up with people saying how great it was. I was caught off guard, and I know I wasn't the only one. Now if you imagine a courtroom where a killer has just been convicted, the grieving family of those who were killed will probably breathe a sigh of relief and have some measure of resolve that justice was served. They will also probably still be crying, much like what I saw from photos on The New York Times at ground zero with people who had lost loved ones.
For those that lost loved ones on 9/11, I don't hold it against them that they might feel that justice was served, but it was not those who lost loved ones that I saw in pictures or commenting with chants and cheers. Those that were cheering and partying were excited about the killing of a person who was the mastermind behind a plot that killed over 3000 innocent Americans. When the Green River Killer or Unibomber were put away, were those times to party? No, they weren't. They were times for breathing a sigh of relief.
What is there exactly to party about?
After 10 years, the world's most powerful military was able to finally pinpoint the person that masterminded the attacks and send in a strike team. One guy with a small group of guardsmen against a United States strike team. Do you really expect he would have prevailed? This wasn't the United States and Britain landing at Normandy on D-Day and pushing back one of the most powerful and disgusting military powers of the 20th Century, the Nazis. This was one guy and guardsmen in a compound with the world's most powerful military sending a strike team in. This was nothing to party about.
So why the cheers? Why the chants? Would we have liked it if people in the Middle East cheered during 9/11? No, we wouldn't have. We would have resented it. But, you say, this time it's totally different. Yeah, right. I heard the same thing during the housing bubble. That "this time is different." Sadly, it isn't. By chanting and cheering, we fail to learn from what happened on 9/11. 9/11 wasn't just a terrorist act. It was a statement. It was a statement by a small group of people who lived under repressive regimes sponsored by the United States that they had had enough. I do not condone the attacks on 9/11, nor do I condone the ruthless killing of 3000+ innocent civilians. But hasn't our government, by proxy and directly, done the same to others?
How about the human rights of our military partners? We get so excited about how we have womens rights that we conveniently forget about how our government recently signed a $60 billion arms deal with one of the most repressive governments on Earth when it comes to women's rights, our oh so "strategic military partner" - Saudi Arabia. Women in Saudi Arabia enjoy the same or lower level of rights that blacks did during South Africa's Apartheid and in the American South before the Civil Rights Act. And men and others? Try being executed if you are gay or having your arm amputated if you rob someone. But they're pitching it as a way for us to counterbalance a growing Iran. Haven't we seen this script before? Wasn't one of the worst allies in our history in a similar situation? Oh, that's right. We did a similar thing with Saddam Hussein by providing him weapons to counterbalance Iran all over again, and judging by history, that didn't turn out too well. And somebody will inevitably try to claim that for some odd reason, "this time it's different."
If our government is so quick to be military partners with people who actively crush both the economic and social freedom of their people, should we really be that surprised if one or a group of those people under the repressive regime, who has nothing to lose, takes out their anger on us? We really shouldn't be. What should be more surprising is that we get surprised at all.
So Osama bin Laden is dead, but is the world really a better place?
