[News] Osama Bin Laden was killed yesterday in a CIA operation in northern Pakistan

I can't wait to see what conspiracy theories are going to grow out of this. I might start one that the announcement was timed to cover the fact that the US Supreme Court just banned class action lawsuits, thereby removing any chance consumers might once of had for taking large corporations to court.

Also looking forward to the video of Osama Bin Laden holding tomorrow's newspaper coming out during the week.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

As a moral and symbolic victory, I think it's fair enough that Americans go a bit flag-wavy over this but the death of Bin Laden will have exactly zero effect on world terrorism, except perhaps providing a martyr figure for the recruiters to play on. There seems to be this weird idea in certain parts of the US media that Al Quaida is some kind of Bond villain-esque group of super criminals, all with some sinister, overreaching plot to destroy the West and that by killing Bin Laden, you've stopped the evil mastermind behind everything. The reality is that Al Quaeda isn't an organisation as such, it's a cause for individual groups of terrorists to affiliate themselves to. Like the IRA back in the day, the terrorists operate as individual cells who don't know each other and act almost entirely autonomously. They share resources like bomb making lessons online but beyond that, it's highly doubtfull that there's any form of senior organisation that's telling them all what to do.

With his movements so obviously limited and with little in the way of communication capability in and out of his hut, chances are Bin Laden's done fuck all in the way or terrorism planning for years. Killing him isn't going to stop people wanting to blow shit up and trying to blow shit up. What's been far more effective is security forces across the world getting a better idea of what kind of domestic terrorist tries to blow shit up and stopping them before they manage it.

Knocking off Bin Laden is going to be great for reducing the US public's war weariness and will probably see Obama walk into a second term though. It might also mark the beginningof a pull-out of Afganistan, perhaps the death of Bin Laden is the first step in a move to pull out and claim victory rather than admit that you've achieved basically nothing since the initial invasion?

There's nowhere I can't reach.