On Bin Laden’s youngest wife

The New Neo Posted on by

I was wondering where she was and how she’s doing. Here’s a report.

Her name is Amal Ahmed al-Sadah and she is 27. She was shot in the leg during the raid that killed her husband and is recovering in a military hospital in Pakistan, which is refusing to hand her over to the US.

Why did the SEALS not take her with them? The official explanation is that there was no room in the helicopter, which seems a little strange to me for such an important capture.

The following is of special interest:

Ms al-Sadah, who is half the age of 54-year-old bin Laden and younger than some of his at least 20 children, had been gifted to the al-Qaeda leader from a Yemeni family when she was just a teenager

She was just 17 when she and Bin Laden wed in Afghanistan. They later had three children together.

Bin Laden had later reportedly sent her home to Yemen for her own safety but somehow she returned despite being under surveillance.

She has already told Pakistani investigators they had been living in the compound since 2005, according to Time magazine.

Of his other wives, bin Laden had divorced one and three others had moved to Syria.

I wonder what this woman really thinks. Most likely she is just as much a fanatic as her husband, indoctrinated pretty much from birth and groomed to be a consort to the great man. But perhaps not.

And I’m wondering who the divorced wife is. This article purports to shed some light on the matter, but I wonder. It’s got a lot of its other facts wrong, based on erroneous early reports from John Brennan that a wife was used by Osama as a human shield and was killed.

But from the information contained therein about Bin Laden’s marriages, it appears that most of his brides were young teenagers, and that two are divorced from him and another reports herself as having been out of contact with him since 9/11. It appears, therefore, that the guy has been forced to live a fairly monogamous life with al-Sadah in recent years. If we can’t interrogate her, that would be really unfortunate.

As for estranged son Omar, here’s a heartwarming story:

“As time passed, [father Osama] began caning me and my brothers for the slightest infraction,” Omar wrote in an excerpt. He recalled his break with his father, which came when Osama asked him to volunteer to be a suicide bomber and Omar refused. Upon demanding how he could ask such a thing of his sons, bin Laden replied, “’You hold no more a place in my heart than any other man or boy in the entire country’”¦ My father hated his enemies more than he loved his sons.”

[ADDENDUM: Unrelated but interesting.]

After Jello hits the floor

The New Neo Posted on by

Many of you may have noticed that I’ve been derelict in posting about jello lately.

What can I say? I’ve been busy. It slipped my mind. There’s nothing new in the jello world.

Flimsy excuses, I know.

But I will now attempt to remedy that failing of mine with the following video of jello’s surprisingly bouncy qualities:

Why am I showing this now? Well, this morning I had a puzzling jello experience, and I thought the video might be able to shed light on the mystery. I was eating some jello—something I rarely do, by the way—and a large clump of it fell off my spoon and onto the floor, only to roll towards the bottom of the stove and under it. But when I looked for it there, it was nowhere to be found.

Disappeared. Not even an oozing purple stain to show where it had once been. I ask the scientists among you to please help explain this perplexing phenomenon, if you can.

Osama, Obama, and Bush: the left’s double standard on terrorists

The New Neo Posted on by

Does anyone doubt for a moment how it would have gone down with the left had it been Bush instead of Obama as Commander-in-Chief of the mission to get Osama?

Murderer of an unarmed man. Wimp who hesitated 16 hours to make a decision. Hand forced by others. Braggart afterward. Bungled and contradictory information release. Invading the space of a sovereign nation.

Then there’s the left’s concerted attempt to explain that the enhanced interrogation policy under Bush had nothing to do with getting the information that led to Bin Laden. Or the contradiction in their condemning waterboarding so strongly but praising the Obama administration’s targeted killing of terrorists and (at least in some cases) their family members, whether through drone or firefight.

Case in point: none other than Michael Moore. He declares that Osama Bin Laden was most likely unarmed, and the idea was always to kill him whether he could have been taken alive or not [emphasis mine]:

Common sense tells you he was executed. That was the plan all along. Just tell us that and quit treating us like children.

I have a lot of faith in Obama, but we’ve received three different stories in three days. We heard, “There was a firefight.” “He used a woman as a shield.” Now it turns out none of these things were true. He wasn’t armed…

[Telling the truth about it wouldn’t] hurt [Obama], because the basic facts will remain the same. Osama is still dead and everybody is happy about it.

Does anyone on earth think that, if it had been Bush rather than Obama, the sentiments would read the same? That Moore would have a lot of faith in Bush despite these circumstances, the lies, the execution-style killing? Or that it wouldn’t hurt Bush if the truth came out?

And in the interests of fairness, let’s ask the same question of the right: that is, if it had been Bush instead of Obama in charge, would their reaction have been different?

We can’t know for sure, but my observation is that most on the right have given Obama some credit for this one. Some have even praised him. Would the left have done the same for Bush? I don’t think so.

As for the right’s criticism of the bungled (or purposely obfuscated) information that’s been disseminated about the raid afterward, that appears to be an equal-opportunity reaction, common on both right and left. So my best guess is that had it been Bush in charge of that the right would have been carping about it as well. It’s not as though Bush was the right’s darling during his presidency; he incurred lots of criticism in his time, especially for his poor communication skills.

Also, if Bush had been in charge of this, the right wouldn’t have one particular handicap the left suffers under: they wouldn’t need to explain away contradictions in the policies they advocate. Most of the right was in favor of enhanced interrogation under certain limited circumstances. Most of the right in in favor of killing terrorists extra-judicially. They wouldn’t need to undergo mental gymnastics to justify their support of the Osama killing.

The mermaid dress returns

The New Neo Posted on by

Mermaid dresses have become au courant. Beyonce sports one here that’s truly hideous:

beyonce.jpg

The dress’s awfulness goes beyond the mere fact that Beyonce can barely walk in it. It’s not just the tight bottom; the top part of the garment is painfully restrictive as well, the decolletage conjuring up the pressed-duck bodices of the Tudor era:

anneboleyn.jpg

And, in another Tudoresque connection, Beyonce’s garb makes me think of these guys, who lack the decolletage but have some of the trimmings:

beefeater.jpg

I well remember the mermaid dresses from 50s. My mother had one that served me as a dress-up costume when it finally got worn and tired. I thought—wrongly, as it turned out—that when I grew up I’d have many opportunities to wear beautiful gowns and go to balls, too. But nada.

Here’s an example of the 50s version of the mermaid. It was indeed much lovelier than today’s more crass evocations of the genre, but probably just as much of an impediment to walking:

mermaid50s.jpg

[NOTE: While doing research for this post, I came across something I’d never heard of before called the sumptuary laws. Talk about the nanny state! Maybe progress isn’t illusory after all.]

[ADDENDUM: Oh, and what’s with that lacy stuff on the top of Beyonce’s breasts? Is it fabric, or some sort of tattoo?]

International law and Bin Laden’s death

The New Neo Posted on by

Now comes Thomas Darnsté¤dt in Spiegel with the predictable European take on Bin Laden’s death, which is that it was most likely an illegal violation of international law:

Claus Kress, an international law professor at the University of Cologne, argues that achieving retributive justice for crimes, difficult as that may be, is “not achieved through summary executions, but through a punishment that is meted out at the end of a trial.” Kress says the normal way of handling a man who is sought globally for commissioning murder would be to arrest him, put him on trial and ultimately convict him.

And on and on it goes in similar vein to explain why Osama should not have been killed but instead tried in a court of international law: Bin Laden may not even have been an operational leader of al Qaeda anymore; it’s “questionable whether the USA can still claim to be engaged in an armed conflict” with al Qaeda anyway; it’s not certain what “theater of operations” this was part of; and a sovereign state (Pakistan) had its territory infringed.

So much blather. If the law is an ass, then international law is one of the biggest asses of all, unless confined to the very specific situation of two parties who have agreed to submit to it.

International law is a toothless, irrelevant, and sometimes counterproductive and destructive tiger with no force whatsoever except by that consent. As I wrote some time ago:

To be “bound” by a certain law, one (or both) of two things need to be true: (1) the “bound” entity has to agree to the authority of those administering the law; (2) the authority has to have the power of enforcement over that entity.

And consider this (in which I’ve substituted “Osama” for “Saddam” and “Spiegel” for “the Guardian” in the original):

[Spiegel], along with much of Europe, doesn’t seem to know what to do with outlaws. [Osama] was an outlaw from international law. It’s as though Europe thinks of the world as a sort of tea party, and that anyone knocking on the door and wanting to come in would quite naturally play by tea-party rules: pick up a cuppa, grab a cucumber sandwich, sit down and chat a while.

But it’s no tea party, it’s an armed world of high-stakes power struggles, with vicious and tyrannical killers such as [Osama]…Then the European tea party breaks down, and the lawmen have to be armed. And sometimes outlaws have to be taken out…

Kenneth Anderson has this to say at the law blog Volokh:

International law is grounded in the practice of states, and the practice of some states matters more than others. One might think that wicked or unjust or what have you, but if one wants international law to be something more than law professor fantasies, it has to be grounded in how states behave. International law can get a little bit ahead of where states want to go, but not very far ahead…

But the US government’s pragmatic view ”” long at the center of State Department legal approaches, including the one that authorized the killing of Bin Laden as a lawful attack against a lawful target in an armed conflict ”” is best seen as protecting this important, but fragile, category called international law … from itself. From its most enthusiastic supporters, who are always willing to purify it into a form of law suitable only for uninhabited planets or maybe heaven.

Terrorists such as Bin Laden inhabit (or, in his case, used to inhabit) this earth. So does the United States. And on this earth, when private citizens declare war on a country and its private citizens, and murder nearly 3,000 unarmed people in cold blood for political reasons, those perpetrators can be considered fair game for as long as they live, wherever they hide out, and however long it takes.

That may not be international law, but as even President Obama said, it’s justice.

[ADDENDUM: Victor Davis Hanson on the subject (hat tip: commenter Bill West).]

On reaching dental senility

The New Neo Posted on by

I have reached a certain dental age, the point at which every visit to the dentist seems to elicit some bad news. Even something as innocuous as a tooth-cleaning—which I had the other day—sparks a pronouncement that more work is needed, and the job always seems good for that dental minimum, the thousand dollar bill.

This time the offender was an old filling, a relic of my wild pre-flouride youth and a typical amount of candy. I emerged from adolescence sporting a set of choppers liberally sprinkled with gleaming metal, but now the last vestiges of those original fillings are going quickly, to be replaced by a set of expensive crowns and something called onlays.

Why? Subject to the forces of toothgrinding and just normal eating for all these years, their integrity further undermined by those massive fillings, many of my molars have decided to crack under the pressure. Literally. Cracks hurt; they drive you to the dentist, and the grief the fissures have given you makes you willing to pay any price to get it over with and stop hurting.

But this latest drama was not a crack, it was the erosion of an old filling that led to some sort of pre-infection state and the need for a redo. By this time, so many of my teeth have been fixed and re-fixed that the whole thing is looking mighty spiffy, virtually the only part of me that has grown more attractive with age.

At my dentist’s office, there’s now a full-time person there whose entire job appears to be discussing your bill and how you “wish” to pay for it. I don’t have dental insurance, but from what I hear, insurance pays only a pittance (if that) for most procedures anyway. I was joking with this lady that, by the time I depart this earth, my teeth will have finally reached near-perfection. She assured me that, in the case of teeth, it’s a good deal—you can take it (or rather, them) with you.

Has Obama already won in 2012?

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems an absurd title for a post—of course he hasn’t won. The election’s a year and a half away.

And yet I’ve been astounded at the number of people who say the election’s already over. From The View to the comments section of a gazillion blogs, the consensus from many is that, with the end of Bin Laden, Obama has it all sewed up.

Do they really believe this, or is it just trash talk chest-thumping propaganda? I don’t know; perhaps a bit of both. But I have to say it puzzles me even as a concept.

It may be that I give people too much credit for actual thought. But I can’t imagine that most Americans will experience much more than a sigh of relief and a swell of pride at the news, and a feeling that Obama got it right this time. But anyone who reads what happened—and thinks about it for more than a superficial fleeting moment—must know that this was the culmination of years of hard effort by both administrations, but most especially by the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community, and then the Navy Seals.

There’s little question that much of the information was gleaned through policies of the Bush administration towards the capture of terrorists and their interrogation, policies that Obama and most Democrats did their very best to undermine and negate. There’s also little doubt that the Navy Seals are an extraordinary bunch of men, both in their training and in their execution of the mission. There’s also the fact that Obama had the guts and brains to make a good call in ordering them in and then getting out of their way so they could do the job. And perhaps there was an element of good luck as well.

How this information—accessible to anyone who takes a moment or two to read about it and reflect on it even at the most basic level—translates into a sure win for Obama is beyond me. The incident doesn’t even begin to negate several years of destructive foreign and domestic policy, nor stupidity on the very relevant question of how to treat terrorists. Plus, on a very practical level, there’s an awful lot of time before November of 2012, and you can rest assured that a quite a few things will happen in the interim that will make Osama Bin Laden’s death but a distant memory.

But don’t get me wrong; I’ve never thought Obama was a pushover in 2012. Even before the Bin Laden killing, it was a strong possibility that Obama would win a second term. It all depends on the events of the next year and a half, and who the Republicans choose to run against him.

And it better not be Donald Trump.

Killing Osama

The New Neo Posted on by

Fragmentary information is slowly emerging about the Navy Seal operation that got Osama Bin Laden. It should be fascinating to learn more. The tale—if ever learned in its entirety, which I doubt will occur for security reasons—would no doubt rival scenes from any action movie.

I try to imagine the mindset of those who set off on this mission. They have so much more courage than I that it’s hard to channel, even imaginatively, what they must have thought and felt. Their coolness and steely determination, and their willingness to die in such an endeavor if need be, is both awesome and necessary. I think of Orwell’s (possibly misattributed) words: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

One of the nuggets of information revealed so far is that tracking the doings of an al Qaeda courier led the Seals to their prize, and that the information that led to identifying the courier’s was gleaned many years ago from questioning of a Guantanamo prisoner. Just another argument in favor of what went on at Guantanamo and its usefulness to us:

One courier in particular had our constant attention,’ one official said.

The hunt was frustrated because detainees could only give his nickname and ‘nom de guerre.’ He was a protege of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States now in custody at Guantanamo Bay prison.

It wasn’t until four years ago that the CIA, working with other US intelligence organizations, uncovered the courier’s identity. It took another two years of ‘persistent effort’ to find the general area where the courier and a brother operated in Pakistan.

‘Still, we were unable to pinpoint exactly where they lived, due to extensive operational security on their part,’ an official said.

In August 2010, they finally found the compound where the brothers lived – a million-dollar, well-fortified mansion in an affluent area where retired Pakistan military officers lived…

It was about eight times larger than other homes in the area, with 4-to-6 metre high walls topped with barbed wire.

Then there were the give-aways: the residents of the compound burnt their refuse, unlike their neighbours who put it out for collection. There were few outside windows. And it had no telephone or internet connections.

Intelligence analysts learned there was a third family living there, in addition to the families of the courier and his brother. The best assessment was that it was ‘most likely’ bin Laden, with several family members, including his youngest wife.

As confidence mounted, Obama finally gave the signal – after chairing five national security meetings, the last of them on Friday – to raid the compound.

Early Sunday, in the ‘early morning hours in Pakistan,’ the assault force moved on its target.

The raid itself was a cliffhanger, being carried out inside Pakistan by US operatives – possibly including CIA agents, but that was not specified by the official – in a civilian neighbourhood on a highly fortified compound, making it an ‘especially dangerous operation.’

The team used two helicopters to get to the compound, where they spent ‘under 40 minutes’ and avoided contact with local Pakistani authorities.

Bin Laden ‘did resist the assault force’ and ‘he was killed in a firefight,’ an official said.

In addition to bin Laden, four others were killed. Three men who were believed to be the brothers and an adult son of bin Laden’s – and a woman who ‘was used as a shield by a male combatant.’ Two other women were injured, officials said.

The meaning of Bin Laden’s death

The New Neo Posted on by

Bin Laden’s death, real as it is, is basically symbolic. Its message is that the US will not relent in its pursuit of those who would perpetrate terrorism against its citizens. Unfortunately, that message has been negated and attenuated by many competing and/or opposing ones over the years that indicate the US is lacking in that same resolve.

Reaction seems more muted than it would have been had this happened years ago. Far too much has transpired since, and Bin Laden himself had kept such a low profile that it seemed he was nearly dead already (or mostly dead, a la “The Princess Bride”).

Who were the people celebrating last night in Times Square and in front of the White House? They looked very young, and if you do the math they were probably only children at the time of the 9/11 attack. It seemed like a sports crowd after a Superbowl victory. Perhaps they were just happy that we finally can declare a win.

I can’t recall another time when America celebrated the death of a single person, even a vicious enemy. Comparisons have been made with the death of Hitler, but there’s really no comparison whatsoever. Hitler’s death was overshadowed by a much larger simultaneous event: the end of the European theater of WWII.

Intentional killer of innocents though Bin Laden was, his murder toll was miniscule compared to that of the German leader. What’s more, Hitler was a suicide. He killed himself because Germany had been soundly defeated in a lengthy and total war; the Nazis weren’t defeated because he killed himself. And unlike the case with Islamic terrorism, Nazism was not embedded in a larger philosophy or belief system that has a life of its own.

There is one similarity to the fate of the Reich’s leaders, however: their burial. Although—unlike Bin Laden—they were tried in the military tribunals known as the Nuremberg trials, and those who were sentenced to death were executed and their bodies cremated, their ashes were dumped in the Isar River in Munich. The Allies were cognizant of the fact that an actual gravesite would provide a shrine for followers, and they were determined that nothing of the sort would happen. Thus, the water burial. No doubt the same reasoning has dictated Bin Laden’s burial at sea.