Osama bin Laden whacking, reactions
The way I heard about Osama bin Laden’s death was almost surreal. It started out with a post on Volokh.com (which now seems deleted) that went like:
Bin Laden is dead. Good.
(HT: Bette Davis)
This was on a lazy Sunday night; I hadn’t checked email or news all weekend, so … this just came out of nowhere. But when I googled “bin Laden dead” there were actual legit stories claiming the same thing, so the reality of the news slowly started to sink in.
A lot of information has come out since then. Anticipating the doubt about bin Laden’s death and positive identification, U.S. apparently confirmed visual identification with DNA comparison with family members of bin Laden (also confirmed by Rep. Rogers (R)). There is yet another surreal account of a blogger live-blogging the event (unknowingly) as well.
But perhaps most convincing of all, al Qaida is vowing revenge. I am guessing that the evidence U.S. has (not all have been publicly released, including photos and videos of the raid) is so conclusive that even al Qaida isn’t even trying to keep the legend of bin Laden alive.
I am, of course, interested in various long term repercussions, such as any changes in President Obama’s political fortunes (as much as we all would applaud him for this accomplishment, we all would also prefer a Republican president in 2013, whose foreign and domestic policies we can support). And what’s going to happen in Pakistani-American relationship? Are we still on good terms? Or do the details of raid, as well as how it was conducted (with no notice to Pakistan), show that we are allies in name only?
Well. I just have one remaining question: the rapidity of news flow (from 10 p.m. Sunday EDT to early morning Monday) is leading me to suspect maybe some in the media were notified (and given time to write the news articles), probably after the raid but before President Obama’s announcement. Was that the case? If so, well, kudos to the administration for preventing any leaks before 10 p.m. Sunday EDT—if nothing else, it shows they had good judgment on whom to provide early release to and whom not to.