I think I agree with everything Juan has said, with two caveats. First, if the point about "assassination" is a legal and not a factual one, then this lawyer thinks it's fair to say that the facts as they may be further revealed and as we currently understand them are compatible with the use of the word "assassinate" in colloquial usage. I don't think we know enough to know what the operational plan really was, but if it was "go and kill this guy" I'd call that an assassination, though perhaps not in a sense actionable under US law. Second, the final statement is a tad loaded. The totality of information available gives *significant* *evidential* *support* for the thesis that at least *elements* within the Pakistani state apparatus were complicit in harboring him. But of course you can't "prove" that Bin Laden is even dead, can you? And what US policymakers care about is, just how useful are these guys to work with, and feed? And in the US, and in the US government in the past few days, an awful lot of people are saying "not very." Surely that's fair.
I don't know if this is needlessly prissy or not, but almost none of these statements are either true or false, but expressions of attitudes. #1 *contains* a fact (that OBL was killed unarmed); #2 contains a false allegation of fact; #3 contains a rather implausible allegation of fact (why now? why reveal one's own behavior likely to displease those to whom you reveal it and upon whom one is dependent for almost two billion diollars a year?); #6 appears to be a factual claim but really means "was unimportant" which is too vague to even evaluate. All the other statements are pure expressions of feeling. You cannot "know" that someone is "not very Christian" even if it is an appropriate thing to say. When someone claims to "know" eight things and it turns out that they only "know" one thing (that OBL was killed unarmed) but mistakenly believe a couple more things and have strong feelings about the rest, and the topic is politics, what we have is not called "knowledge" about which one can be "informed." It is called "propaganda." This is a game two, indeed, all, can play. The truth is that what we "know" is that America Is Always Wrong(tm).
Juan, I haven't been following your work closely for awhile, so I didn't know that you were doing this. This is a great thing you are trying to do, and I wish you much success. As for some of the snark above, the least I'd say is, little good was ever accomplished by restricting access to the written word.
I think I agree with everything Juan has said, with two caveats. First, if the point about "assassination" is a legal and not a factual one, then this lawyer thinks it's fair to say that the facts as they may be further revealed and as we currently understand them are compatible with the use of the word "assassinate" in colloquial usage. I don't think we know enough to know what the operational plan really was, but if it was "go and kill this guy" I'd call that an assassination, though perhaps not in a sense actionable under US law. Second, the final statement is a tad loaded. The totality of information available gives *significant* *evidential* *support* for the thesis that at least *elements* within the Pakistani state apparatus were complicit in harboring him. But of course you can't "prove" that Bin Laden is even dead, can you? And what US policymakers care about is, just how useful are these guys to work with, and feed? And in the US, and in the US government in the past few days, an awful lot of people are saying "not very." Surely that's fair.
I don't know if this is needlessly prissy or not, but almost none of these statements are either true or false, but expressions of attitudes. #1 *contains* a fact (that OBL was killed unarmed); #2 contains a false allegation of fact; #3 contains a rather implausible allegation of fact (why now? why reveal one's own behavior likely to displease those to whom you reveal it and upon whom one is dependent for almost two billion diollars a year?); #6 appears to be a factual claim but really means "was unimportant" which is too vague to even evaluate. All the other statements are pure expressions of feeling. You cannot "know" that someone is "not very Christian" even if it is an appropriate thing to say. When someone claims to "know" eight things and it turns out that they only "know" one thing (that OBL was killed unarmed) but mistakenly believe a couple more things and have strong feelings about the rest, and the topic is politics, what we have is not called "knowledge" about which one can be "informed." It is called "propaganda." This is a game two, indeed, all, can play. The truth is that what we "know" is that America Is Always Wrong(tm).
Juan, I haven't been following your work closely for awhile, so I didn't know that you were doing this. This is a great thing you are trying to do, and I wish you much success. As for some of the snark above, the least I'd say is, little good was ever accomplished by restricting access to the written word.