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Originally Posted by roachboy
slims---what do you think the deal is with the official story about this? why so many bizarre-o details? why so much moving around of them?
the decision to dump the body in the ocean is still excedingly strange. apparently no-one is buying the "respect for custom" line since he would have had to die aboard a ship for there to be such a custom.
my freezer malfunction joke seems more plausible by the day...
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I think the official story is changing because our relationship with Pakistan is changing....Quickly.
I think we straight up went in and killed Osama on a Pakistani Army Cantonment area, in a compound built by ISI deliberately to hide him. The direct implication is that the Pakistani Government supported, sheltered and hid Osama for years while accepting huge sums of money from the United States to 'look for him'. UBL was not inactive, just marginalized due to the necessity to maintain a degree of separation from his organization, so if what I wrote above turns out to be true then the PK government was also allowing him to control Al Qaeda operations... That may very well turn the American public so far against PK that we pull all our support and aid money.
President Obama is nothing if not political, so he very well may have initially shaped the narrative in a more positive light for Pakistan in the hopes that they would accept it as both a warning and an olive branch. The story that initially came out would have allowed PK to save face publicly, kept the US population from becoming enraged, and would have been private leverage for the president to hold over Pakistan in order to push for actual cooperation.
It seems we have released more and more information roughly synchronized with Pakistani government statements. The more the PK government backs away from the raid and condemns it the more we publish regarding PK's complete lack of cooperation in the raid, the fact that they have repeatedly burned CT targets when information was shared in the past, and some choice details such as the fact that the house was actually on the grounds of the military cantonment....
There is, I am sure another factor at work here that has nothing to do with politics but rather the confusion that always happens in a fight. It takes time to sort through the details of exactly what happened. The guys on the ground involved in the action will often remember bits and pieces with big gaps or chronological errors. It is normal for the initial situation reports that are sent up from the objective to be incomplete or wildly inaccurate. It is not anyones intention to get things wrong, but shit happens when adrenaline is up.
Then during the debriefings it probably became clear that some of the initial impressions were inaccurate and we began backing away from the unintentional mis-truths.
I think it was a genius move to bury the body at sea.... It solves many of the problems that would have accompanied any burial. It prevents a spot on the ground from becoming a 'shrine' to that ideology, removes the liability and continuing expenses that would be incurred by any country that hosted his body, and got rid of him before huge riots, etc. could be organized.
I think what we meant by handled in the Muslim tradition is that a Mullah was allowed to give a prayer, the body was cleaned, and the burial took place within 24 hours of the death...That is enough to prevent widespread accusations of impropriety a-la Pershing.