Usama

He's dead. Or so we are told. No photos -- yet -- and no body either. Conveniently dumped in the Arabian Sea from the carrier USS Carl Vinson.

Something is profoundly unsatisfying about this.

There he was living in a Pakistani suburb of a town founded by a British major Abbott. Abbottabad. Living a a fortified compound less than 800 meters from the Pakistani equivalent of Sandhurst, in private isolation: no cable TV, no internet (so we are told -- but that does not include satellite dishes). High walls, barbed wire and nobody at Sandhurst thought to have a peek inside.

Bullshit.

The Pakistanis for some reason were sheltering him.  And certainly nobody would have thought to look for OBL basically on a Pakistani military base ... best cover in the world.  And even if located, who is going to send troops in to get him? The Pakistanis? They already have him under the tent flap. Send a missile? Unless you can go in afterwards and make sure you nailed him, you are not going to do that -- we have always needed to have proof. And the ISI (Paki intelligence -- and no, that is NOT an oxymoron) have this need to play to the Muslim crowd, so we would not get the benefit, we'd never be sure that he succeeded.

So we have always needed to kill him in person ... or take him captive. For their own purposes, that would never do for ISI -- they need something to keep their Waziristan madrassas and the U.S.  occupied. OBL has, therefore, represented a useful distraction.  For whatever reason, ISI has supported the Taliban and home grown crazies since the start of the U.S. ... remember, it was a Pakistani group that did the Mumbai hotel shoot-out. 

So Obama -- following the Bush doctrine to the letter -- ordered a hit, by Seal Team 6. Now there's a group of people that could really rain on your parade. Now, I know that Obama went on TV with a lot of "I ordered", "I reviewed", "I developed" and other verbal diarrhea, but this was Bush ... plain and simple -- I read a report somewhere that Bush was IN THE WHITE HOUSE during the attack. I just can't give Obama credit for that ... that must be a false report. But, it is true that Obama made the order -- it has to come from him. But imagine that it gets out that he failed to order the hit because he was squeamish about "collateral damage." Good-bye 2012. This was a do or die. He's know that OBL was there since March ... but failed to order the missile hit because of the verification issue.

Ex-President Musharraf of Pakistan was all over the papers yakking on about violation of sovereignty and Pakistan's being abused by this action....  Either he was out of the loop, or they just didn't know that we knew.  Which leads us to some interesting questions: (1) how did we physically get in there to it; (2) did the Pakis know; (3) how did we keep secrecy; (4) did we alert "friends"; (5) did we nearly "pooch" it when the one chopper went down; (6) was this the ultimate black op (until the firecrackers started going off); (7) where were the Pakistani troops after a 40 minute firefight (or leave them alone, its OBL's house, we know they like their AKs). And a whole lot more.

Then there are the other questions: (a) is he dead; (b) did we find much intel; (c) are the American public stupid enough to "buy" the spin from the WH?

More tomorrow on this.