Bin Laden is dead!

[executioner]

Your time has come to meet your maker.

[rexreed]

I guess Toby Keith will need to write another song.

[Jonathan]

Maybe now the TSA can stop molesting children, and we can bring the boys back home.

[executioner]

Maybe now the TSA can stop molesting children, and we can bring the boys back home.

Yes let's pray it can happen soon. I think Pakistan has some questions to answer too though.

[Carolina Petra Fan]

A Great Moment Indeed!!

[Dan]

Awesome!! was great news when Obama announced Osama's demise. (I am going to need to see the corpse)

[Shell]

Valid point Matthew; however, an evil person has been removed and I for one am not sorry about that and I'm not going to apologize for not being sorry. It's sad that such drastic measures had to be taken to get rid of him, but they did give him a chance to surrender and he chose not to. He chose his death. And no matter what his people may think, he is no martyr.

[Shell]

No, He didn't rejoice...He was saddened, and this is a sad thing in that it had to be so drastic. But Jesus did have a few things to say about reaping what you sow...And He also had a few things to say about treating others the way you would want to be treated and being truthful. Would it be better to pretend we're sorry he's gone when we're not? Ben Laden brought this on himself.

[CatNamedManny]

There's a fine line between celebrating the implications of someone's death and actually celebrating their death. Stuff like "welcome to hell" and chanting "U-S-A" and whooping it up is a little too close to those who celebrated the burning and hanging of American contractors in Iraq or the 9/11 attacks themselves. Yes, Osama was guilty while "our guys" were innocent; culturally, I'm not sure the Iraqis and Palestinians would agree.

I'm absolutely happy that innocent men, women and children who might otherwise have been killed in a bin Laden-planned attack will now be spared the pain and anguish that afflicted the 9/11 victims and their families (as well as the African embassy bombing victims, London and Spain train bombing victims and the numerous Muslims killed in al Qaeda-fueled sectarian warfare across the Middle East — and all their families). It's unquestionably a good thing when an evil man is prevented from harming more people than he's already harmed. If killing him was the only way to do that, then I think we should be grateful for those willing to do that, but celebrating any loss of life strikes me as barbaric and unchristian.

Put another way, I doubt Jesus celebrated anything upon learning that Judas hanged himself.

[Dan]

There's a fine line between celebrating the implications of someone's death and actually celebrating their death. Stuff like "welcome to hell" and chanting "U-S-A" and whooping it up is a little too close to those who celebrated the burning and hanging of American contractors in Iraq or the 9/11 attacks themselves. Yes, Osama was guilty while "our guys" were innocent; culturally, I'm not sure the Iraqis and Palestinians would agree.

I'm absolutely happy that innocent men, women and children who might otherwise have been killed in a bin Laden-planned attack will now be spared the pain and anguish that afflicted the 9/11 victims and their families (as well as the African embassy bombing victims, London and Spain train bombing victims and the numerous Muslims killed in al Qaeda-fueled sectarian warfare across the Middle East — and all their families). It's unquestionably a good thing when an evil man is prevented from harming more people than he's already harmed. If killing him was the only way to do that, then I think we should be grateful for those willing to do that, but celebrating any loss of life strikes me as barbaric and unchristian.

Put another way, I doubt Jesus celebrated anything upon learning that Judas hanged himself.

IMO I think if you are directly effected by loss of life due to Al Qaeda there is a reason to celebrate. The whole chanting USA thing is out of pure wanting to believe that the gov has done the job and done it good.

Jesus would not have celebrated true, but I doubt Jesus would have celebrated the release of Back to the Rock either, he was not human but in perfection in human form. Who celebrated when Judas hung himself? only the devil because Judas took it upon himself to take his own life out of shame. Judas wasn't proud of his sin. Osama took every attack with a celebration (or a grainy audio tape).

I can't believe that Osama is dead until we see proof in any case.

[Muleya]

Well, you won't see the corpse...buried at sea last night!

And I hardly think this marks the end of anything! In fact, many news reports are saying terrorist attempts will likely arise in the short term.

[Dan]

How convenient.

[Shell]

There is some wisdom in the saying "don't believe anything you hear and only about half of what you see." I tend to not trust the media. However, in this case, I don't think they would have announced this if it wasn't true. That wouldn't have served any purpose.

I learned a long time ago anything is possible.

[Muleya]

How convenient.

It was explained that he was buried at sea so that there is no place that can be set up as a shrine to draw his followers. This actually makes a lot of sense.

I heard on the news last night that eventually a photo will be made available. But I'm not even sure how much that means...as Matthew alludes, photos can easily be doctored with very professional results. I think it comes down to either you believe it or you don't.

(BTW, Matthew, didn't you see the Mythbusters where they bust all the theories about the moon landings being faked! )

I've been a little surprised at how cohesive the big players are here. I haven't heard any of the usual suspects voice any doubts. It's mostly on forums like this, and then your typical "conspiracy theorist" types raising the question. But none of Obama's political adversaries seem to be questioning it, which surprises me a little bit. Seems to give the story some additional credibility.

[CatNamedManny]

People don't make this kind of stuff up. If they did, don't you think maybe the previous president would have wanted to wrap up his legacy a little neater, or maybe Obama would have done it a little earlier, say right before the 2010 elections, to give his party a boost?

The reason why people don't make this kind of stuff up is because people in Washington are not as all-powerful as people on boards like this tend to believe. Like in any other large organization, coordination is difficult, information is easy to leak, and internal politics makes bringing together all the pieces you'd need in a large conspiracy nearly impossible. Everyone looks at a movie like "Wag the Dog," and thinks that's how things work in D.C. It's not. People may be corrupt at times, power-hungry at times or lie to save their skins at times. But the risk of having a fabrication like this revealed would be far more damaging to the incumbent president than some high gas prices.

Look at the worst of the lies, incompetence and corruption we've seen in the past 50 years — Johnson distorting or overlooking evidence to make it seem like the U.S. was attacked by the communist North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin in order to have reason to escalate our presence in Southeast Asia, Nixon compiling enemies lists and using the FBI and IRS to intimidate and spy on political opponents, Reagan defying newly enacted laws to fund the Contras by selling arms to Iran, Clinton publicly parsing the definition of "sex" and "is" in denying an affair with a White House intern, Bush selling the world on weapons of mass destruction and imminent danger from Iraq despite the lack of WMDs and a proven lack of connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. All of these things eventually came out. They cost Johnson a chance for a second full term, led to Nixon's resignation in the face of impeachment and forced public apologies from Reagan and Clinton. Only Bush seems to have emerged officially unscathed, though he left office with historically low approval ratings, above only Nixon's at the time each left office.

Far more likely (though still quite unlikely in this case, given the DNA match and the comments from bin Laden's own daughter) would be a case of mistaken identity, where agents killed a body double by accident and thought it was him. On the corruption-incompetence scale, that might be more on par with Bush's WMD claims, except it's far easier to confirm that someone or something you have in hand is or is not what you think it is. If there were a way to test with 99.9 percent certainty whether a country has weapons of mass destruction, then we could have saved a lot of money and lives in Iraq and probably caught bin Laden much earlier.

So all that to say, there's plenty of reason to believe Osama bin Laden was indeed killed late Sunday night/early Monday morning. and pretty much no reason to disbelieve it.