Apparently being a terrorist leader gets you 6 pages of obituary on the NYTimes.com web site.  All you ever (or never) wanted to know about the life and times of OBL.

Update:
The President will make a statement soon. CNN is waxing eloquent about what important blow this is. I disagree. OBL was killed in a mansion near Islamabad. There are some spontaneous cheers from crowds in Washington for Spring Break. We haven’t seem something like that in a very long time.

Pakistan government sources have confirmed it. It claimed to be a joint US/Pakistani intelligence operation that got OBL.

Update II:
Obama recaps the war on terror. It appears it a was a special ops team that took out OBL. It looks like the breaking new killed the NY Times website. This link seems to work better.

Effective push back against Liz Cheney and others of her ilk by Jason Sigger at Crooks & Liars. Turns out the Bushies made frequent and effective use of civilian courts to try people on terrorism charges. Much more effective than the military tribunal train wreck approach.

Every debate over expanded government surveillance power is invariably framed as one of “security v. privacy and civil liberties” — as though it's a given that increasing the Government's surveillance authorities will “make us safer.” But it has long been clear that the opposite is true…

…The failure of the U.S. Government to detect the fairly glaring Northwest Airlines Christmas plot — despite years and years of constant expansions of Surveillance State powers — illustrates this dynamic perfectly.  As President Obama said yesterday, the Government — just as was true for 9/11 — had gathered more than enough information to have detected this plot, or at least to have kept Abdulmutallab off airplanes and out of the country.  Yet our intelligence agencies — just as was true for 9/11 — failed to understand what they had in their possession.  Why is that?  Because they had too much to process, including too much data wholly unrelated to Terrorism.  In other words, our panic-driven need to vest the Government with more and more surveillance power every time we get scared again by Terrorists — in the name of keeping us safe — has exactly the opposite effect.  Numerous pieces of evidence prove that.

Today in The Washington Post, that paper’s CIA spokesman, David Ignatius, explains that Abdulmutallab never made it onto a no-fly list because there are simply too many reports of suspicious individuals being submitted on a daily basis, which causes the system to be “clogged” — overloaded — with information having nothing to do with Terrorism.  As a result, actually relevant information ends up obscured or ignored.

via Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin

A democracy cannot function in a permanent state of fear. We give up a bit of safety for our freedom. It’s small price to pay. There was another piece by Nate Silver at 538.com that puts it into perspective:

The Odds of Airborne Terror

…there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning

You have a much better chance dying in a car crash on  the way to an airport, with odds of roughly 1 in 100 in a lifetime of driving. Maybe we should focus more on real dangers instead of imagined ones? Our media establishment lives off of hyping fears to drive ratings and underminds the basis of our democracy in the process.

File this one under “no shit?”

The great unanswered question of the last six and a half years is: why haven’t we been attacked again? There are logically two – not necessarily exclusive – possibilities: our defense has been getting much better; their offense was over-rated. I suspect that technology, good police work, and plenty of heroic stories that neither you nor I know about have made a difference. But seven years is a long time. And Bush is not exactly Mr Competence, is he?Have we misread the world – and over-estimated the threat – even more profoundly than we realize? That is the question.

A small band of cave dwelling bomb throwers was never an existential threat to the US. On the other hand, the reaction to terrorism by the Bush administration most definitely is a threat to the principles this nation has always stood for.

I strongly agree with Ezra’s post. Job one: Close Guantanamo. No dallying around thinking about it. Scrap the military tribunal kangaroo court. Put them in a Federal maximum security facility and start civilian trials. The issue will be that evidence gained through torture won’t be admissible, and it shouldn’t be in any country that claims to be civilized. Deport them if they can’t be tried because BushCo sanctioned the use of illegal interrogation methods methods.

Why I Believe Bush Must Go – washingtonpost.com
Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly “high crimes and misdemeanors,” to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team’s assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged — perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion — by far the highest in our national history.

Sadly he is correct in saying that we lack the statesmen with the stones to do what is clearly right.

1. A CIA employee says they used waterboarding on a prisoner.
2. The US uses only legal methods of interrogation.
3. Therefore waterboarding is legal.

Seems pretty straight forward, but the White House spokesperson Dana Perino refuses to say if it’s legal or not. Why might that be? We have 100 years of history going back to the American occupation of the Philippines, prosenUS law and international treaties that clearly defines waterboarding as torture. Can’t go that way. The other option is

Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry – New York Times
But the battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime.

The N.S.A.’s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before, according to government and industry officials, yet that alliance is strained by legal worries and the fear of public exposure.

To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified. But in 2004, one major phone carrier balked at turning over its customers’ records. Worried about possible privacy violations or public relations problems, company executives declined to help the operation, which has not been previously disclosed.

In a separate N.S.A. project, executives at a Denver phone carrier, Qwest, refused in early 2001 to give the agency access to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls, according to people aware of the request, which has not been previously reported. They say the arrangement could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order, which alarmed them.

So we tortured the al-Qaeda village idiot, then claimed a great victory against a high level operative. Despite being briefed about the real value of the poor fool by the CIA, Bush went on TV to say that we’d foiled deadly plots and saved lives. Don’t you feel safer already?

Did $1.5 trillion get us more secure? Buy an awe-inspiring display of American military might? Cheaper oil? A sound dollar? Exactly what did we purchase for so high a price? A generation of hatred? Worldwide disdain? A near total loss of moral authority on the world stage? Did we show Islamic extremists the limits of American military power? When will Congress shut off the near unlimited flow of money? Is it possible for them to finally show some backbone?

Anyone who would trust the government on this is a deluded fool

The presidency of George W. Bush is a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

Levin was fired for daring to not toe the line and be a good Bushy.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will, unless something drastically changes, approve Judge Mukasey for Attorney General without him uttering the words “water boarding is illegal”. This is not to protect military personnel, it is to protect policy makers, up to and including the president. The interrogators are immunized by law. It is the senior civilian leadership that’s at risk.

When will someone in a position of power actually do something about it? There is no ambiguityabout torture. It’s wrong, it’s illegal and it’s actionable. As Wategate veteran John Dean suggests, can’t we at least get a special prosecutor to investigate war crimes?

Crooks and Liars has the whole thing here.

Rice Says U.S. Will Review Aid To Pakistan – washingtonpost.com
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday that the United States would review its $150 million-a-month assistance program to Pakistan in response to the declaration of emergency rule by the president, Gen. Pervez Mushar.

Pakistan has long been a safe harbor for terrorists in the area along the nearly non-existent border with Afghanistan. It’s intelligence service and military are rife with al-Qaeda  sympathizers. It’s not terribly stable and has nukes. More attention should have been paid to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. Instead we’re bogged down in Iraq. Now both seem to be deteriorating.

Blast at Mall Kills 8 in Philippines – New York Times
Eight people were killed and as many as 130 others wounded Friday when a powerful explosion ripped through a shopping mall in Makati City, the Philippine capital’s financial district.

Wow, that’s frightening. My wife and I have been to that mall many times. It one block away from the hotel my company uses in Manila. I’ve walked through entrance to Glorietta 2 right where the bomb went off many times. We’ve had dinner at Gerry’s Grill and North Park right across the street.

No matter what the grievance killing random strangers won’t bring anything but more bloodshed. Undoubtedly the military will step up the bloody campaign against Abu Sayyaf in the south, leading to further reprisals. Will it ever end?