Cultural Genocide and the end of Tibet

There is a tendancy among most people to not care about changes that don't affect them. China is becoming a stronger and big super power. In my life they have changed much of the worlds economic and cultural landscape. In the life times of my children and grandchildren, even great and more dynamic changes will be coming in years ahead. Their power to reshape an entire culture is incredible. And that's what they are doing in Tibet. The story is sad but is a foreshadowing of what any government with a strong enough fist can do. America in the future can also be reshaped. For good or for worse.

The following story is by John Graham.

For ten days last month I saw first-hand what the Chinese are doing in Tibet. The reports you've heard of cultural genocide are true. China is obliterating the ideas, traditions and habits of the Tibetan people.

Do we care? We'd better. China's confidence increases with each step onto the world stage. What the Chinese are doing in Tibet tells us a lot about what we can expect from them as their power grows.

It's hard to get into Tibet. I described myself as a retiree on a Bucket List trip and prayed the Chinese would not bother to Google me. I was in Nepal, waiting, when the Chinese Embassy gave me a visa just hours before the flight I'd booked to Llasa. A short, spectacular flight across the Himalayas, and I was in the capital of Tibet.

Llasa is a Potemkin Village. The Chinese have built an modern airport and superhighway into town. Change the language on the signs and the part of Llasa that foreigners are supposed to see looks like a small wealthy city in Arizona. Better. Modern shops and manicured parks line the main street. The downtown is impeccably clean, there's no congestion, and the traffic signals are high-tech marvels. Late-model cars outnumber motorbikes and most of those bikes are electric so there's no hammering noise and choking fumes.

There was a significant uprising in Lhasa only three years ago and the Chinese want no more of that. Even in the part of Llasa open to foreigners, small units of Chinese soldiers in riot gear are stationed every hundred yards and foot patrols are high-stepping reminders to the Tibetans of the iron fist that rules their lives.

A key part of the Chinese plan has been flooding Tibet with Chinese immigrants from the east. Already Lhasa is 60% Chinese. The best-paying jobs all go to Chinese while Tibetans pick through what's left. Tibetans often suffer low-level harassment of many kinds that restrict where they can travel and where they can live. They can get thrown in jail for downloading a photograph of the Dalai Lama. In schools, Chinese is taught as the "mother tongue." In those few places where Chinese signs are translated into Nepalese and English, the Chinese characters are twice as large as the English and four times as large as the Tibetan. The Tibetans get the point.

Poke behind the Potemkin walls, however, and just a few hundred yards from the manicured boulevards of downtown Llasa you'll find acres of simple Tibetan houses, made of stone and cinderblock. It's a crime not to fly the Chinese flag from your roof, but two-thirds of these little households risk a heavy fine not to do it. The victory is temporary: Tibetan houses are being bulldozed one by one, with their residents moved to Cabrini Green-type high-rises as fast as these can be built. Farm folk who've been scratching a living on their land for generations are now watching Chinese soap operas on the 16th floor of a Cabrini Green flat instead of talking with their friends in local teahouses and watching the sun go down over an acre or two of their barley. Forced moves like this starve not bodies but souls. The idea is to lead Tibetans, especially young Tibetans, to forget who they are.

The Chinese presence is a little less visible when you leave the capital, as I did on an eight-day road trip along the spine of the Himalayas, on roads and tracks that took us as high as 16,000 feet, winding through a barren series of sharp brown hills. Thirty miles to the south rose the jagged white wall of the highest mountains on earth.

China overran Tibet in the early 1950's, the last episode in a fifteen hundred year struggle between Tibetans, Mongols and Chinese for political control of the "rooftop of the world." The Chinese authorities forced Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, to flee into exile in 1959. During China's Cultural Revolution in the 1960's, gangs of Red Guards destroyed nearly all the Buddhist monasteries in Tibet and killed or dispersed 90% of the monks in a frenzied assault on Tibetan ideas, culture, customs and habits. All this fueled a fierce anger and resentment among Tibetans, a proud people with their own warlike past.

Realizing the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese leadership adopted a smarter course. Today, a blanket Army presence discourages open rebellion while massive infusions of cash are building a modern infrastructure that is yanking Tibet out of feudalism and into the 21st century. There's some truth in what a Chinese tourist told me in Llasa, "We are raising standards of living in the region with our investment, and providing Tibetans with better lives." Tibetans now enjoy hospitals, government buildings, schools, paved roads, electric power, and censored-but-operable cell phones and Internet, none of which would be there without the Chinese. Compared to neighboring Nepal, the Tibet I saw looked modern. But all this cash is also meant to buy friends, especially among the young or those with short memories.

Contrary to reports I'd read before I arrived, the Chinese also seem to have withdrawn their heavy hand from the monasteries. Most of them have been rebuilt, some with Chinese help. Even the smallest towns have monasteries with ornate paintings, statues and wall hangings. I saw no Chinese soldiers or police near the holy places, which were crowded with local people who seemed to be freely exercising their faith. There's no way this could have been staged for a lone tourist, in place after place. Tibet may be the most religious country on earth. Beijing may have finally realized that Tibetan Buddhism is the only element in the country stronger than the Chinese presence.

It's not clear that adding carrots to the stick is succeeding. There have been a continuing series of protests and uprisings in Tibet for the last sixty years. Eleven monks have burned themselves alive this year alone. It was not easy to get Tibetans to talk with me, and I certainly didn't blame my driver/minder for sticking to his tourist script. Still, when they did talk -- out of sight or hearing of anyone who looked Chinese -- most Tibetans made it clear how much they hated the Chinese for invading their country, but even more for deliberately trying to destroy their culture and their way of life.

My itinerary on this trip was tightly controlled and my papers checked at the police and army posts that dotted the country like sheafs of barley. My e-mails were monitored (type in "Dalai Lama" and my Internet Café connection would suddenly disappear). There was no Facebook or YouTube, and Google searches were heavily restricted. I kept all my handwritten notes in a personal code on food wrappers mixed in with my dirty socks.

What's next for Tibet?

China will never willingly cede political control to the restive Tibetans. Nor are they likely to change a basic strategy of assimilating Tibet into 21st century China, until the Tibetan culture is nothing more than a colorful artifact.

Still, the Chinese must be worried about an "Arab Spring." The Chinese are right to fear the power of the monasteries to move angry people to rebel in ways that would catch the attention of the world. If the Tibetans are willing to make the sacrifices, there could indeed be Tahrir Squares here. And that would force the Chinese to either stop their assaults on Tibetan culture -- or lay down a violent suppression that would bring them global condemnation. What the world thinks of their actions in Tibet may not have mattered to China twenty years ago. But with the Beijing Olympics, China announced its presence and involvement in the larger world. At least China's younger and more progressive leaders understand that what they do at home now is judged in ways that can seriously affect their ambitions on the world stage. And that does matter -- to them, to the Tibetans, and to us.

Very Thoughtful insults

When insults had "Pith."

These glorious insults are from an era before the English
language got boiled down to 4-letter words.....

A member of Parliament to Disraeli:
"Sir, you will either die on the gallows
or of some unspeakable disease."
"That depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace
your policies or your mistress."

"He had delusions of adequacy."
- Walter Kerr

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I
admire."
- Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many
obituaries with great pleasure."
- Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.."
- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book;
I'll waste no time reading it."
- Moses Hadas

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying
I approved of it."
- Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his
friends."
- Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new
play; bring a friend, if you have one."
- George Bernard Shaw to WinstonChurchill

"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second ...
if there is one."
- Winston Churchill, in response.

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having
you here."
- Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator."
– John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing
trivial."
- Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in
others."
- Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up."
- Paul Keating

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded
easily."
- Charles, Count Talleyrand

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him."
- Forrest Tucker

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without
any address on it?"
- Mark Twain

“His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."
-Mae West

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever
they go."
- Oscar Wilde

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts...
for support rather than illumination."
- Andrew Lang, 1912

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music."
- Billy Wilder

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't
it."
- Groucho Marx

European Life is dying

The following is a copy of an article written by Spanish writer Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez and published in a Spanish newspaper on Jan. 15, 2008. It doesn't take much imagination to extrapolate the message to the rest of Europe - and possibly to the rest of the world. REMEMBER AS YOU READ -- IT WAS IN A SPANISH PAPER
Date: Tue. 15 January 2008 14:30


ALL EUROPEAN LIFE DIED IN AUSCHWITZ
By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez
I walked down the street in Barcelona , and suddenly discovered a terrible truth - Europe died in Auschwitz . We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought,creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world. The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned. And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty, due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride. They have blown up our trains and turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime. Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts. And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition. We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs. What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe. The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000; that is ONE BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION or 20% of the world's population. They have received the following Nobel Prizes:
Literature: 1988 - Najib Mahfooz
Peace:1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
1990 - Elias James Corey
1994 - Yaser Arafat:
1999 - Ahmed Zewai
Economics:(zero)
Physics:(zero)
Medicine:1960 - Peter Brian Medawar
1998 - Ferid Mourad
TOTAL: 7 SEVEN

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000; that is FOURTEEN MILLION or about 0.02% of the world's population. They have received the following Nobel Prizes: Literature:
1910 - Paul Heyse
1927 - Henri Bergson
1958 - Boris Pasternak
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 - Nelly Sachs
1976 - Saul Bellow
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 - Elias Canetti
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1991 - Nadine Gordimer
WorldPeace:
1911 - Alfred Fried
1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser
1968 - Rene Cassin
1973 - Henry Kissinger
1978 - Menachem Begin
1986 - Elie Wiesel
1994 - Shimon Peres
1994 - Yitzhak Rabin
Physics:
1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 - Henri Moissan
1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
1910 - Otto Wallach
1915 - Richard Willstaetter
1918 - Fritz Haber
1921 - Albert Einstein
1922 - Niels Bohr
1925 - James Franck
1925 - Gustav Hertz
1943 - Gustav Stern
1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
1952 - Felix Bloch
1954 - Max Born
1958 - Igor Tamm
1959 - Emilio Segre
1960 - Donald A. Glaser
1961 - Robert Hofstadter
1961 - Melvin Calvin
1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
1965 - Julian Schwinger
1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
1971 - Dennis Gabor
1972 - William Howard Stein
1973 - Brian David Josephson
1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
1976 - Burton Richter
1977 - Ilya Prigogine
1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
1978 - Peter L Kapitza
1979 - Stephen Weinberg
1979 - Sheldon Glashow
1979 - Herbert Charles Brown
1980 - Paul Berg
1980 - Walter Gilbert
1981 - Roald Hoffmann
1982 - Aaron Klug
1985 - Albert A. Hauptman
1985 - Jerome Karle
1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
1988 - Robert Huber
1988 - Leon Lederman
1988 - Melvin Schwartz
1988 - Jack Steinberger
1989 - Sidney Altman
1990 - Jerome Friedman
1992 - Rudolph Marcus
1995 - Martin Perl
2000 - Alan J. Heeger
Economics:
1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 - Simon Kuznets
1972 - Ken neth Joseph Arrow
1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
1976 - Milton Friedman
1978 - Herbert A. Simon
1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 - Franco Modigliani
1987 - Robert M.. Solow
1990 - Harry Markowitz
1990 - Merton Miller
1992 - Gary Becker
1993 - Robert Fogel
Medicine:
1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
1908 - Paul Erlich
1914 - Robert Barany
1922 - Otto Meyerhof
1930 - Karl Landsteiner
1931 - Otto Warburg
1936 - Otto Loewi
1944 - Joseph Erlanger
1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser
1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman
1953 - Hans Krebs
1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958 - Joshua Lederberg
1959 - Arthur Kornberg
1964 - Konrad Bloch
1965 - Francois Jacob
1965 - Andre Lwoff
1967 - George Wald
1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969 - Salvador Luria
1970 - Julius Axelrod
1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman
1975 - Howard Martin Temin
1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow
1978 - Daniel Nathans
1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
1984 - Cesar Milstein
1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
1986 - Stanley Cohen & Rita Levi-Montalcini
1988 - Gertrude Elion
1989 - Harold Varmus
1991 - Erwin Neher
1991 - Bert Sakmann
1993 - Richard J. Roberts
1993 - Phillip Sharp
1994 - Alfred Gilman
1995 - Edward B. Lewis
1996- Lu RoseIacovino
TOTAL: 129!

The Jews are NOT promoting brain-washing children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause the maximum number of deaths of Jews and other non-Muslims. The Jews don't hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, or blow themselves up in German restaurants. There is NOT one single Jew who has destroyed a church. There is NOT a single Jew who protests by killing people.The Jews don't traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels. Perhaps the world's Muslims should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems. Muslims must ask what can they do for humankind before they demand that humankind respects them. Regardless of your feelings about the crisis between Israel and thePalestinians and Arab neighbors, even if you believe there is more culpability on Israel 's part, the following two sentences really say itall: If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.
Benjamin Netanyahu

When the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps, he ordered all possible photographs to be taken and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead. He did this because he said in words to this effect: Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened. Recently, the UK debated whether to remove The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it 'offends' the Muslim population, which claims it never occurred. It is not removed as yet. However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving in to it.

Wisdom learned in the past year

For the past year and three months, my life has had a little career path change, and I've been in West Texas working in the oilfields.

I noticed after a month or so of working around roustabouts and pulling unit crews and pumpers that there is a lot of wisdom out here that has been expressed in ways, I'd not thought of. I started writing them down when I'd hear them so I could . . .hopefully . . .make a learning experience out of this time, instead of just hard work and sweat.

Here for your learning experience is what I've gleaned in a year:

Don't do card tricks with the same guys you play poker with.

Always drink upstream from the herd.

Don't say I told you so.

Once you get started, all you like is finishing up.

Don't take nothing, unless you can use it. And then take 2 in case you loose 1.

You can't make a bowl of chicken salad from a pile of chicken s$%t.

Make sure you are nice to everybody on the way up, cuz you might need a friend on your way back down.

Treat your hands like you'd like to be treated.

We'd better take that before someone steals it?

If you like seein rainbows, you gotta be willin to see some rain.

A punctual schedule in the oil field means we must have overlooked doing something.

Be sure and work for someone that's going to pay you.

They sure can't tell you something to do, if they can't find you.

Don't borrow money to drill a dry hole.

The world doesn't owe you a living. It was here first.

The best way to make a million in the oil field is to start off with ten million.

If you know they aren't going to pay anyway, there's no harm in quoting them a really good deal. Just don't do it.

Always listen to the working hand on the rig floor. Even that little weevil might have a better way to do something.

5 Geologists agreeing on an idiotic idea, doesn't mean it's still not idiotic.

Give the hardest job to the laziest guy. He will damn sure figure out the simplest way to do it.

Don't open up a can or worms unless you also know how to get them back in the can.

Wrenches
Wrenches work best if you take the time to get your fingers out of them first.
If you respect his fingers with the wrench in your hands, he'll respect yours when he's got the wrench.

tighty righty. Lucy lefty.

Pride in yourself don't help momma buy the groceries. Pride in your job gets you a paycheck to give her.

Double check the plunger catcher before you open it up above your head.

Don't work on the rig floor downwind from the operator who likes to chew or dip.

If you can eat when you're hungry and sit on the pot when you need to, most every other problem seems to work itself out.

Be very careful about whose toes you step on today because they may be connected to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow.

80 hour work weeks are ok, but take off on Sunday.

You will never get to the bottom of the hole if you turn the bit backwards.

Dying early is not the equivalent to early retirement.

You can't listen to music and work good at the same time. Music will distract you a little. And a little distraction can make you a little bit dead.

Getting Bin Laden

What Happened that night in Abbottabad.

No American was yet inside the residential part of the compound. The operatives had barely been on target for a minute, and the mission was already veering off course.

Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU. A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard. It was a moonless evening, and the helicopters’ pilots, wearing night-vision goggles, flew without lights over mountains that straddle the border with Pakistan. Radio communications were kept to a minimum, and an eerie calm settled inside the aircraft.

Fifteen minutes later, the helicopters ducked into an alpine valley and slipped, undetected, into Pakistani airspace. For more than sixty years, Pakistan’s military has maintained a state of high alert against its eastern neighbor, India. Because of this obsession, Pakistan’s “principal air defenses are all pointing east,” Shuja Nawaz, an expert on the Pakistani Army and the author of “Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within,” told me. Senior defense and Administration officials concur with this assessment, but a Pakistani senior military official, whom I reached at his office, in Rawalpindi, disagreed. “No one leaves their borders unattended,” he said. Though he declined to elaborate on the location or orientation of Pakistan’s radars—“It’s not where the radars are or aren’t”—he said that the American infiltration was the result of “technological gaps we have vis-à-vis the U.S.” The Black Hawks, each of which had two pilots and a crewman from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, or the Night Stalkers, had been modified to mask heat, noise, and movement; the copters’ exteriors had sharp, flat angles and were covered with radar-dampening “skin.”

The SEALs’ destination was a house in the small city of Abbottabad, which is about a hundred and twenty miles across the Pakistan border. Situated north of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, Abbottabad is in the foothills of the Pir Panjal Range, and is popular in the summertime with families seeking relief from the blistering heat farther south. Founded in 1853 by a British major named James Abbott, the city became the home of a prestigious military academy after the creation of Pakistan, in 1947. According to information gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency, bin Laden was holed up on the third floor of a house in a one-acre compound just off Kakul Road in Bilal Town, a middle-class neighborhood less than a mile from the entrance to the academy. If all went according to plan, the SEALs would drop from the helicopters into the compound, overpower bin Laden’s guards, shoot and kill him at close range, and then take the corpse back to Afghanistan.

The helicopters traversed Mohmand, one of Pakistan’s seven tribal areas, skirted the north of Peshawar, and continued due east. The commander of DEVGRU’s Red Squadron, whom I will call James, sat on the floor, squeezed among ten other SEALs, Ahmed, and Cairo. (The names of all the covert operators mentioned in this story have been changed.) James, a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer’s frame that one might expect of a SEAL—he is built more like a discus thrower. That night, he wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle. (Others SEALs had chosen the Heckler & Koch MP7.) A “blowout kit,” for treating field trauma, was tucked into the small of James’s back. Stuffed into one of his pockets was a laminated gridded map of the compound. In another pocket was a booklet with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside. He wore a noise-cancelling headset, which blocked out nearly everything besides his heartbeat.

During the ninety-minute helicopter flight, James and his teammates rehearsed the operation in their heads. Since the autumn of 2001, they had rotated through Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and the Horn of Africa, at a brutal pace. At least three of the SEALs had participated in the sniper operation off the coast of Somalia, in April, 2009, that freed Richard Phillips, the captain of the Maersk Alabama, and left three pirates dead. In October, 2010, a DEVGRU team attempted to rescue Linda Norgrove, a Scottish aid worker who had been kidnapped in eastern Afghanistan by the Taliban. During a raid of a Taliban hideout, a SEAL tossed a grenade at an insurgent, not realizing that Norgrove was nearby. She died from the blast. The mistake haunted the SEALs who had been involved; three of them were subsequently expelled from DEVGRU.

The Abbottabad raid was not DEVGRU’s maiden venture into Pakistan, either. The team had surreptitiously entered the country on ten to twelve previous occasions, according to a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid. Most of those missions were forays into North and South Waziristan, where many military and intelligence analysts had thought that bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders were hiding. (Only one such operation—the September, 2008, raid of Angoor Ada, a village in South Waziristan—has been widely reported.) Abbottabad was, by far, the farthest that DEVGRU had ventured into Pakistani territory. It also represented the team’s first serious attempt since late 2001 at killing “Crankshaft”—the target name that the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, had given bin Laden. Since escaping that winter during a battle in the Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan, bin Laden had defied American efforts to trace him. Indeed, it remains unclear how he ended up living in Abbottabad.
Forty-five minutes after the Black Hawks departed, four MH-47 Chinooks launched from the same runway in Jalalabad. Two of them flew to the border, staying on the Afghan side; the other two proceeded into Pakistan. Deploying four Chinooks was a last-minute decision made after President Barack Obama said he wanted to feel assured that the Americans could “fight their way out of Pakistan.” Twenty-five additional SEALs from DEVGRU, pulled from a squadron stationed in Afghanistan, sat in the Chinooks that remained at the border; this “quick-reaction force” would be called into action only if the mission went seriously wrong. The third and fourth Chinooks were each outfitted with a pair of M134 Miniguns. They followed the Black Hawks’ initial flight path but landed at a predetermined point on a dry riverbed in a wide, unpopulated valley in northwest Pakistan. The nearest house was half a mile away. On the ground, the copters’ rotors were kept whirring while operatives monitored the surrounding hills for encroaching Pakistani helicopters or fighter jets. One of the Chinooks was carrying fuel bladders, in case the other aircraft needed to refill their tanks.

Meanwhile, the two Black Hawks were quickly approaching Abbottabad from the northwest, hiding behind the mountains on the northernmost edge of the city. Then the pilots banked right and went south along a ridge that marks Abbottabad’s eastern perimeter. When those hills tapered off, the pilots curled right again, toward the city center, and made their final approach.
During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered. Mark, a master chief petty officer and the ranking noncommissioned officer on the operation, crouched on one knee beside the open door of the lead helicopter. He and the eleven other SEALs on “helo one,” who were wearing gloves and had on night-vision goggles, were preparing to fast-rope into bin Laden’s yard. They waited for the crew chief to give the signal to throw the rope. But, as the pilot passed over the compound, pulled into a high hover, and began lowering the aircraft, he felt the Black Hawk getting away from him. He sensed that they were going to crash.

One month before the 2008 Presidential election, Obama, then a senator from Illinois, squared off in a debate against John McCain in an arena at Belmont University, in Nashville. A woman in the audience asked Obama if he would be willing to pursue Al Qaeda leaders inside Pakistan, even if that meant invading an ally nation. He replied, “If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable, or unwilling, to take them out, then I think that we have to act and we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden. We will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national-security priority.” McCain, who often criticized Obama for his naïveté on foreign-policy matters, characterized the promise as foolish, saying, “I’m not going to telegraph my punches.”

Four months after Obama entered the White House, Leon Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., briefed the President on the agency’s latest programs and initiatives for tracking bin Laden. Obama was unimpressed. In June, 2009, he drafted a memo instructing Panetta to create a “detailed operation plan” for finding the Al Qaeda leader and to “ensure that we have expended every effort.” Most notably, the President intensified the C.I.A.’s classified drone program; there were more missile strikes inside Pakistan during Obama’s first year in office than in George W. Bush’s eight. The terrorists swiftly registered the impact: that July, CBS reported that a recent Al Qaeda communiqué had referred to “brave commanders” who had been “snatched away” and to “so many hidden homes [which] have been levelled.” The document blamed the “very grave” situation on spies who had “spread throughout the land like locusts.” Nevertheless, bin Laden’s trail remained cold.

In August, 2010, Panetta returned to the White House with better news. C.I.A. analysts believed that they had pinpointed bin Laden’s courier, a man in his early thirties named Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Kuwaiti drove a white S.U.V. whose spare-tire cover was emblazoned with an image of a white rhino. The C.I.A. began tracking the vehicle. One day, a satellite captured images of the S.U.V. pulling into a large concrete compound in Abbottabad. Agents, determining that Kuwaiti was living there, used aerial surveillance to keep watch on the compound, which consisted of a three-story main house, a guesthouse, and a few outbuildings. They observed that residents of the compound burned their trash, instead of putting it out for collection, and concluded that the compound lacked a phone or an Internet connection. Kuwaiti and his brother came and went, but another man, living on the third floor, never left. When this third individual did venture outside, he stayed behind the compound’s walls. Some analysts speculated that the third man was bin Laden, and the agency dubbed him the Pacer.

Obama, though excited, was not yet prepared to order military action. John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, told me that the President’s advisers began an “interrogation of the data, to see if, by that interrogation, you’re going to disprove the theory that bin Laden was there.” The C.I.A. intensified its intelligence-collection efforts, and, according to a recent report in the Guardian, a physician working for the agency conducted an immunization drive in Abbottabad, in the hope of acquiring DNA samples from bin Laden’s children. (No one in the compound ultimately received any immunizations.)

In late 2010, Obama ordered Panetta to begin exploring options for a military strike on the compound. Panetta contacted Vice-Admiral Bill McRaven, the SEAL in charge of JSOC. Traditionally, the Army has dominated the special-operations community, but in recent years the SEALs have become a more prominent presence; McRaven’s boss at the time of the raid, Eric Olson—the head of Special Operations Command, or SOCOM—is a Navy admiral who used to be a commander of DEVGRU. In January, 2011, McRaven asked a JSOC official named Brian, who had previously been a DEVGRU deputy commander, to present a raid plan. The next month, Brian, who has the all-American look of a high-school quarterback, moved into an unmarked office on the first floor of the C.I.A.’s printing plant, in Langley, Virginia. Brian covered the walls of the office with topographical maps and satellite images of the Abbottabad compound. He and half a dozen JSOC officers were formally attached to the Pakistan/Afghanistan department of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, but in practice they operated on their own. A senior counterterrorism official who visited the JSOC redoubt described it as an enclave of unusual secrecy and discretion. “Everything they were working on was closely held,” the official said.

The relationship between special-operations units and the C.I.A. dates back to the Vietnam War. But the line between the two communities has increasingly blurred as C.I.A. officers and military personnel have encountered one another on multiple tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. “These people grew up together,” a senior Defense Department official told me. “We are in each other’s systems, we speak each other’s languages.” (Exemplifying this trend, General David H. Petraeus, the former commanding general in Iraq and Afghanistan, is now the incoming head of the C.I.A., and Panetta has taken over the Department of Defense.) The bin Laden mission—plotted at C.I.A. headquarters and authorized under C.I.A. legal statutes but conducted by Navy DEVGRU operators—brought the coöperation between the agency and the Pentagon to an even higher level. John Radsan, a former assistant general counsel at the C.I.A., said that the Abbottabad raid amounted to “a complete incorporation of JSOC into a C.I.A. operation.”
On March 14th, Obama called his national-security advisers into the White House Situation Room and reviewed a spreadsheet listing possible courses of action against the Abbottabad compound. Most were variations of either a JSOC raid or an airstrike. Some versions included coöperating with the Pakistani military; some did not. Obama decided against informing or working with Pakistan. “There was a real lack of confidence that the Pakistanis could keep this secret for more than a nanosecond,” a senior adviser to the President told me. At the end of the meeting, Obama instructed McRaven to proceed with planning the raid.

Brian invited James, the commander of DEVGRU’s Red Squadron, and Mark, the master chief petty officer, to join him at C.I.A. headquarters. They spent the next two and a half weeks considering ways to get inside bin Laden’s house. One option entailed flying helicopters to a spot outside Abbottabad and letting the team sneak into the city on foot. The risk of detection was high, however, and the SEALs would be tired by a long run to the compound. The planners had contemplated tunnelling in—or, at least, the possibility that bin Laden might tunnel out. But images provided by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency showed that there was standing water in the vicinity, suggesting that the compound sat in a flood basin. The water table was probably just below the surface, making tunnels highly unlikely. Eventually, the planners agreed that it made the most sense to fly directly into the compound. “Special operations is about doing what’s not expected, and probably the least expected thing here was that a helicopter would come in, drop guys on the roof, and land in the yard,” the special-operations officer said.
On March 29th, McRaven brought the plan to Obama. The President’s military advisers were divided. Some supported a raid, some an airstrike, and others wanted to hold off until the intelligence improved. Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, was one of the most outspoken opponents of a helicopter assault. Gates reminded his colleagues that he had been in the Situation Room of the Carter White House when military officials presented Eagle Claw—the 1980 Delta Force operation that aimed at rescuing American hostages in Tehran but resulted in a disastrous collision in the Iranian desert, killing eight American soldiers. “They said that was a pretty good idea, too,” Gates warned. He and General James Cartwright, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs, favored an airstrike by B-2 Spirit bombers. That option would avoid the risk of having American boots on the ground in Pakistan. But the Air Force then calculated that a payload of thirty-two smart bombs, each weighing two thousand pounds, would be required to penetrate thirty feet below ground, insuring that any bunkers would collapse. “That much ordnance going off would be the equivalent of an earthquake,” Cartwright told me. The prospect of flattening a Pakistani city made Obama pause. He shelved the B-2 option and directed McRaven to start rehearsing the raid.

Brian, James, and Mark selected a team of two dozen SEALs from Red Squadron and told them to report to a densely forested site in North Carolina for a training exercise on April 10th. (Red Squadron is one of four squadrons in DEVGRU, which has about three hundred operators in all.) None of the SEALs, besides James and Mark, were aware of the C.I.A. intelligence on bin Laden’s compound until a lieutenant commander walked into an office at the site. He found a two-star Army general from JSOC headquarters seated at a conference table with Brian, James, Mark, and several analysts from the C.I.A. This obviously wasn’t a training exercise. The lieutenant commander was promptly “read in.” A replica of the compound had been built at the site, with walls and chain-link fencing marking the layout of the compound. The team spent the next five days practicing maneuvers.

On April 18th, the DEVGRU squad flew to Nevada for another week of rehearsals. The practice site was a large government-owned stretch of desert with an elevation equivalent to the area surrounding Abbottabad. An extant building served as bin Laden’s house. Aircrews plotted out a path that paralleled the flight from Jalalabad to Abbottabad. Each night after sundown, drills commenced. Twelve SEALs, including Mark, boarded helo one. Eleven SEALs, Ahmed, and Cairo boarded helo two. The pilots flew in the dark, arrived at the simulated compound, and settled into a hover while the SEALs fast-roped down. Not everyone on the team was accustomed to helicopter assaults. Ahmed had been pulled from a desk job for the mission and had never descended a fast rope. He quickly learned the technique.

The assault plan was now honed. Helo one was to hover over the yard, drop two fast ropes, and let all twelve SEALs slide down into the yard. Helo two would fly to the northeast corner of the compound and let out Ahmed, Cairo, and four SEALs, who would monitor the perimeter of the building. The copter would then hover over the house, and James and the remaining six SEALs would shimmy down to the roof. As long as everything was cordial, Ahmed would hold curious neighbors at bay. The SEALs and the dog could assist more aggressively, if needed. Then, if bin Laden was proving difficult to find, Cairo could be sent into the house to search for false walls or hidden doors. “This wasn’t a hard op,” the special-operations officer told me. “It would be like hitting a target in McLean”—the upscale Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.

A planeload of guests arrived on the night of April 21st. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, along with Olson and McRaven, sat with C.I.A. personnel in a hangar as Brian, James, Mark, and the pilots presented a brief on the raid, which had been named Operation Neptune’s Spear. Despite JSOC’s lead role in Neptune’s Spear, the mission officially remained a C.I.A. covert operation. The covert approach allowed the White House to hide its involvement, if necessary. As the counterterrorism official put it recently, “If you land and everybody is out on a milk run, then you get the hell out and no one knows.” After describing the operation, the briefers fielded questions: What if a mob surrounded the compound? Were the SEALs prepared to shoot civilians? Olson, who received the Silver Star for valor during the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” episode, in Mogadishu, Somalia, worried that it could be politically catastrophic if a U.S. helicopter were shot down inside Pakistani territory. After an hour or so of questioning, the senior officers and intelligence analysts returned to Washington. Two days later, the SEALs flew back to Dam Neck, their base in Virginia.

On the night of Tuesday, April 26th, the SEAL team boarded a Boeing C-17 Globemaster at Naval Air Station Oceana, a few miles from Dam Neck. After a refuelling stop at Ramstein Air Base, in Germany, the C-17 continued to Bagram Airfield, north of Kabul. The SEALs spent a night in Bagram and moved to Jalalabad on Wednesday.

That day in Washington, Panetta convened more than a dozen senior C.I.A. officials and analysts for a final preparatory meeting. Panetta asked the participants, one by one, to declare how confident they were that bin Laden was inside the Abbottabad compound. The counterterrorism official told me that the percentages “ranged from forty per cent to ninety or ninety-five per cent,” and added, “This was a circumstantial case.”

Panetta was mindful of the analysts’ doubts, but he believed that the intelligence was better than anything that the C.I.A. had gathered on bin Laden since his flight from Tora Bora. Late on Thursday afternoon, Panetta and the rest of the national-security team met with the President. For the next few nights, there would be virtually no moonlight over Abbottabad—the ideal condition for a raid. After that, it would be another month until the lunar cycle was in its darkest phase. Several analysts from the National Counterterrorism Center were invited to critique the C.I.A.’s analysis; their confidence in the intelligence ranged between forty and sixty per cent. The center’s director, Michael Leiter, said that it would be preferable to wait for stronger confirmation of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. Yet, as Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser, put it to me recently, the longer things dragged on, the greater the risk of a leak, “which would have upended the thing.” Obama adjourned the meeting just after 7 P.M. and said that he would sleep on it.

The next morning, the President met in the Map Room with Tom Donilon, his national-security adviser, Denis McDonough, a deputy adviser, and Brennan. Obama had decided to go with a DEVGRU assault, with McRaven choosing the night. It was too late for a Friday attack, and on Saturday there was excessive cloud cover. On Saturday afternoon, McRaven and Obama spoke on the phone, and McRaven said that the raid would occur on Sunday night. “Godspeed to you and your forces,” Obama told him. “Please pass on to them my personal thanks for their service and the message that I personally will be following this mission very closely.”

On the morning of Sunday, May 1st, White House officials cancelled scheduled visits, ordered sandwich platters from Costco, and transformed the Situation Room into a war room. At eleven o’clock, Obama’s top advisers began gathering around a large conference table. A video link connected them to Panetta, at C.I.A. headquarters, and McRaven, in Afghanistan. (There were at least two other command centers, one inside the Pentagon and one inside the American Embassy in Islamabad.)

Brigadier General Marshall Webb, an assistant commander of JSOC, took a seat at the end of a lacquered table in a small adjoining office and turned on his laptop. He opened multiple chat windows that kept him, and the White House, connected with the other command teams. The office where Webb sat had the only video feed in the White House showing real-time footage of the target, which was being shot by an unarmed RQ 170 drone flying more than fifteen thousand feet above Abbottabad. The JSOC planners, determined to keep the operation as secret as possible, had decided against using additional fighters or bombers. “It just wasn’t worth it,” the special-operations officer told me. The SEALs were on their own.

Obama returned to the White House at two o’clock, after playing nine holes of golf at Andrews Air Force Base. The Black Hawks departed from Jalalabad thirty minutes later. Just before four o’clock, Panetta announced to the group in the Situation Room that the helicopters were approaching Abbottabad. Obama stood up. “I need to watch this,” he said, stepping across the hall into the small office and taking a seat alongside Webb. Vice-President Joseph Biden, Secretary Gates, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed him, as did anyone else who could fit into the office. On the office’s modestly sized LCD screen, helo one—grainy and black-and-white—appeared above the compound, then promptly ran into trouble.

When the helicopter began getting away from the pilot, he pulled back on the cyclic, which controls the pitch of the rotor blades, only to find the aircraft unresponsive. The high walls of the compound and the warm temperatures had caused the Black Hawk to descend inside its own rotor wash—a hazardous aerodynamic situation known as “settling with power.” In North Carolina, this potential problem had not become apparent, because the chain-link fencing used in rehearsals had allowed air to flow freely. A former helicopter pilot with extensive special-operations experience said of the pilot’s situation, “It’s pretty spooky—I’ve been in it myself. The only way to get out of it is to push the cyclic forward and fly out of this vertical silo you’re dropping through. That solution requires altitude. If you’re settling with power at two thousand feet, you’ve got plenty of time to recover. If you’re settling with power at fifty feet, you’re going to hit the ground.”

The pilot scrapped the plan to fast-rope and focussed on getting the aircraft down. He aimed for an animal pen in the western section of the compound. The SEALs on board braced themselves as the tail rotor swung around, scraping the security wall. The pilot jammed the nose forward to drive it into the dirt and prevent his aircraft from rolling onto its side. Cows, chickens, and rabbits scurried. With the Black Hawk pitched at a forty-five-degree angle astride the wall, the crew sent a distress call to the idling Chinooks.

James and the SEALs in helo two watched all this while hovering over the compound’s northeast corner. The second pilot, unsure whether his colleagues were taking fire or experiencing mechanical problems, ditched his plan to hover over the roof. Instead, he landed in a grassy field across the street from the house.

No American was yet inside the residential part of the compound. Mark and his team were inside a downed helicopter at one corner, while James and his team were at the opposite end. The teams had barely been on target for a minute, and the mission was already veering off course.

“Eternity is defined as the time be tween when you see something go awry and that first voice report,” the special-operations officer said. The officials in Washington viewed the aerial footage and waited anxiously to hear a military communication. The senior adviser to the President compared the experience to watching “the climax of a movie.”

After a few minutes, the twelve SEALs inside helo one recovered their bearings and calmly relayed on the radio that they were proceeding with the raid. They had conducted so many operations over the past nine years that few things caught them off guard. In the months after the raid, the media have frequently suggested that the Abbottabad operation was as challenging as Operation Eagle Claw and the “Black Hawk Down” incident, but the senior Defense Department official told me that “this was not one of three missions. This was one of almost two thousand missions that have been conducted over the last couple of years, night after night.” He likened the routine of evening raids to “mowing the lawn.” On the night of May 1st alone, special-operations forces based in Afghanistan conducted twelve other missions; according to the official, those operations captured or killed between fifteen and twenty targets. “Most of the missions take off and go left,” he said. “This one took off and went right.”

Minutes after hitting the ground, Mark and the other team members began streaming out the side doors of helo one. Mud sucked at their boots as they ran alongside a ten-foot-high wall that enclosed the animal pen. A three-man demolition unit hustled ahead to the pen’s closed metal gate, reached into bags containing explosives, and placed C-4 charges on the hinges. After a loud bang, the door fell open. The nine other SEALs rushed forward, ending up in an alleylike driveway with their backs to the house’s main entrance. They moved down the alley, silenced rifles pressed against their shoulders. Mark hung toward the rear as he established radio communications with the other team. At the end of the driveway, the Americans blew through yet another locked gate and stepped into a courtyard facing the guesthouse, where Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, bin Laden’s courier, lived with his wife and four children.

Three SEALs in front broke off to clear the guesthouse as the remaining nine blasted through another gate and entered an inner courtyard, which faced the main house. When the smaller unit rounded the corner to face the doors of the guesthouse, they spotted Kuwaiti running inside to warn his wife and children. The Americans’ night-vision goggles cast the scene in pixellated shades of emerald green. Kuwaiti, wearing a white shalwar kameez, had grabbed a weapon and was coming back outside when the SEALs opened fire and killed him.

The nine other SEALs, including Mark, formed three-man units for clearing the inner courtyard. The Americans suspected that several more men were in the house: Kuwaiti’s thirty-three-year-old brother, Abrar; bin Laden’s sons Hamza and Khalid; and bin Laden himself. One SEAL unit had no sooner trod on the paved patio at the house’s front entrance when Abrar—a stocky, mustachioed man in a cream-colored shalwar kameez—appeared with an AK-47. He was shot in the chest and killed, as was his wife, Bushra, who was standing, unarmed, beside him.

Outside the compound’s walls, Ahmed, the translator, patrolled the dirt road in front of bin Laden’s house, as if he were a plainclothes Pakistani police officer. He looked the part, wearing a shalwar kameez atop a flak jacket. He, the dog Cairo, and four SEALs were responsible for closing off the perimeter of the house while James and six other SEALs—the contingent that was supposed to have dropped onto the roof—moved inside. For the team patrolling the perimeter, the first fifteen minutes passed without incident. Neighbors undoubtedly heard the low-flying helicopters, the sound of one crashing, and the sporadic explosions and gunfire that ensued, but nobody came outside. One local took note of the tumult in a Twitter post: “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1 AM (is a rare event).”

Eventually, a few curious Pakistanis approached to inquire about the commotion on the other side of the wall. “Go back to your houses,” Ahmed said, in Pashto, as Cairo stood watch. “There is a security operation under way.” The locals went home, none of them suspecting that they had talked to an American. When journalists descended on Bilal Town in the coming days, one resident told a reporter, “I saw soldiers emerging from the helicopters and advancing toward the house. Some of them instructed us in chaste Pashto to turn off the lights and stay inside.”
Meanwhile, James, the squadron commander, had breached one wall, crossed a section of the yard covered with trellises, breached a second wall, and joined up with the SEALs from helo one, who were entering the ground floor of the house. What happened next is not precisely clear. “I can tell you that there was a time period of almost twenty to twenty-five minutes where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on,” Panetta said later, on “PBS NewsHour.”
Until this moment, the operation had been monitored by dozens of defense, intelligence, and Administration officials watching the drone’s video feed. The SEALs were not wearing helmet cams, contrary to a widely cited report by CBS. None of them had any previous knowledge of the house’s floor plan, and they were further jostled by the awareness that they were possibly minutes away from ending the costliest manhunt in American history; as a result, some of their recollections—on which this account is based—may be imprecise and, thus, subject to dispute.
As Abrar’s children ran for cover, the SEALs began clearing the first floor of the main house, room by room. Though the Americans had thought that the house might be booby-trapped, the presence of kids at the compound suggested otherwise. “You can only be hyper-vigilant for so long,” the special-operations officer said. “Did bin Laden go to sleep every night thinking, The next night they’re coming? Of course not. Maybe for the first year or two. But not now.” Nevertheless, security precautions were in place. A locked metal gate blocked the base of the staircase leading to the second floor, making the downstairs room feel like a cage.

After blasting through the gate with C-4 charges, three SEALs marched up the stairs. Midway up, they saw bin Laden’s twenty-three-year-old son, Khalid, craning his neck around the corner. He then appeared at the top of the staircase with an AK-47. Khalid, who wore a white T-shirt with an overstretched neckline and had short hair and a clipped beard, fired down at the Americans. (The counterterrorism official claims that Khalid was unarmed, though still a threat worth taking seriously. “You have an adult male, late at night, in the dark, coming down the stairs at you in an Al Qaeda house—your assumption is that you’re encountering a hostile.”) At least two of the SEALs shot back and killed Khalid. According to the booklets that the SEALs carried, up to five adult males were living inside the compound. Three of them were now dead; the fourth, bin Laden’s son Hamza, was not on the premises. The final person was bin Laden.
Before the mission commenced, the SEALs had created a checklist of code words that had a Native American theme. Each code word represented a different stage of the mission: leaving Jalalabad, entering Pakistan, approaching the compound, and so on. “Geronimo” was to signify that bin Laden had been found.

Three SEALs shuttled past Khalid’s body and blew open another metal cage, which obstructed the staircase leading to the third floor. Bounding up the unlit stairs, they scanned the railed landing. On the top stair, the lead SEAL swivelled right; with his night-vision goggles, he discerned that a tall, rangy man with a fist-length beard was peeking out from behind a bedroom door, ten feet away. The SEAL instantly sensed that it was Crankshaft. (The counterterrorism official asserts that the SEAL first saw bin Laden on the landing, and fired but missed.)
The Americans hurried toward the bedroom door. The first SEAL pushed it open. Two of bin Laden’s wives had placed themselves in front of him. Amal al-Fatah, bin Laden’s fifth wife, was screaming in Arabic. She motioned as if she were going to charge; the SEAL lowered his sights and shot her once, in the calf. Fearing that one or both women were wearing suicide jackets, he stepped forward, wrapped them in a bear hug, and drove them aside. He would almost certainly have been killed had they blown themselves up, but by blanketing them he would have absorbed some of the blast and potentially saved the two SEALs behind him. In the end, neither woman was wearing an explosive vest.

A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden’s chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. “There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn’t a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees,” the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.) Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden’s life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye. On his radio, he reported, “For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.” After a pause, he added, “Geronimo E.K.I.A.”—“enemy killed in action.”
Hearing this at the White House, Obama pursed his lips, and said solemnly, to no one in particular, “We got him.”

Relaxing his hold on bin Laden’s two wives, the first SEAL placed the women in flex cuffs and led them downstairs. Two of his colleagues, meanwhile, ran upstairs with a nylon body bag. They unfurled it, knelt down on either side of bin Laden, and placed the body inside the bag. Eighteen minutes had elapsed since the DEVGRU team landed. For the next twenty minutes, the mission shifted to an intelligence-gathering operation.

Four men scoured the second floor, plastic bags in hand, collecting flash drives, CDs, DVDs, and computer hardware from the room, which had served, in part, as bin Laden’s makeshift media studio. In the coming weeks, a C.I.A.-led task force examined the files and determined that bin Laden had remained far more involved in the operational activities of Al Qaeda than many American officials had thought. He had been developing plans to assassinate Obama and Petraeus, to pull off an extravagant September 11th anniversary attack, and to attack American trains. The SEALs also found an archive of digital pornography. “We find it on all these guys, whether they’re in Somalia, Iraq, or Afghanistan,” the special-operations officer said. Bin Laden’s gold-threaded robes, worn during his video addresses, hung behind a curtain in the media room.

Outside, the Americans corralled the women and children—each of them bound in flex cuffs—and had them sit against an exterior wall that faced the second, undamaged Black Hawk. The lone fluent Arabic speaker on the assault team questioned them. Nearly all the children were under the age of ten. They seemed to have no idea about the tenant upstairs, other than that he was “an old guy.” None of the women confirmed that the man was bin Laden, though one of them kept referring to him as “the sheikh.” When the rescue Chinook eventually arrived, a medic stepped out and knelt over the corpse. He injected a needle into bin Laden’s body and extracted two bone-marrow samples. More DNA was taken with swabs. One of the bone-marrow samples went into the Black Hawk. The other went into the Chinook, along with bin Laden’s body.

Next, the SEALs needed to destroy the damaged Black Hawk. The pilot, armed with a hammer that he kept for such situations, smashed the instrument panel, the radio, and the other classified fixtures inside the cockpit. Then the demolition unit took over. They placed explosives near the avionics system, the communications gear, the engine, and the rotor head. “You’re not going to hide the fact that it’s a helicopter,” the special-operations officer said. “But you want to make it unusable.” The SEALs placed extra C-4 charges under the carriage, rolled thermite grenades inside the copter’s body, and then backed up. Helo one burst into flames while the demolition team boarded the Chinook. The women and children, who were being left behind for the Pakistani authorities, looked puzzled, scared, and shocked as they watched the SEALs board the helicopters. Amal, bin Laden’s wife, continued her harangue. Then, as a giant fire burned inside the compound walls, the Americans flew away.

In the Situation Room, Obama said, “I’m not going to be happy until those guys get out safe.” After thirty-eight minutes inside the compound, the two SEAL teams had to make the long flight back to Afghanistan. The Black Hawk was low on gas, and needed to rendezvous with the Chinook at the refuelling point that was near the Afghan border—but still inside Pakistan. Filling the gas tank took twenty-five minutes. At one point, Biden, who had been fingering a rosary, turned to Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman. “We should all go to Mass tonight,” he said.
The helicopters landed back in Jalalabad around 3 A.M.; McRaven and the C.I.A. station chief met the team on the tarmac. A pair of SEALs unloaded the body bag and unzipped it so that McRaven and the C.I.A. officer could see bin Laden’s corpse with their own eyes. Photographs were taken of bin Laden’s face and then of his outstretched body. Bin Laden was believed to be about six feet four, but no one had a tape measure to confirm the body’s length. So one SEAL, who was six feet tall, lay beside the corpse: it measured roughly four inches longer than the American. Minutes later, McRaven appeared on the teleconference screen in the Situation Room and confirmed that bin Laden’s body was in the bag. The corpse was sent to Bagram.

All along, the SEALs had planned to dump bin Laden’s corpse into the sea—a blunt way of ending the bin Laden myth. They had successfully pulled off a similar scheme before. During a DEVGRU helicopter raid inside Somalia in September, 2009, SEALs had killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of East Africa’s top Al Qaeda leaders; Nabhan’s corpse was then flown to a ship in the Indian Ocean, given proper Muslim rites, and thrown overboard. Before taking that step for bin Laden, however, John Brennan made a call. Brennan, who had been a C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, phoned a former counterpart in Saudi intelligence. Brennan told the man what had occurred in Abbottabad and informed him of the plan to deposit bin Laden’s remains at sea. As Brennan knew, bin Laden’s relatives were still a prominent family in the Kingdom, and Osama had once been a Saudi citizen. Did the Saudi government have any interest in taking the body? “Your plan sounds like a good one,” the Saudi replied.

At dawn, bin Laden was loaded into the belly of a flip-wing V-22 Osprey, accompanied by a JSOC liaison officer and a security detail of military police. The Osprey flew south, destined for the deck of the U.S.S. Carl Vinson—a thousand-foot-long nuclear-powered aircraft carrier sailing in the Arabian Sea, off the Pakistani coast. The Americans, yet again, were about to traverse Pakistani airspace without permission. Some officials worried that the Pakistanis, stung by the humiliation of the unilateral raid in Abbottabad, might restrict the Osprey’s access. The airplane ultimately landed on the Vinson without incident.

Bin Laden’s body was washed, wrapped in a white burial shroud, weighted, and then slipped inside a bag. The process was done “in strict conformance with Islamic precepts and practices,” Brennan later told reporters. The JSOC liaison, the military-police contingent, and several sailors placed the shrouded body on an open-air elevator, and rode down with it to the lower level, which functions as a hangar for airplanes. From a height of between twenty and twenty-five feet above the waves, they heaved the corpse into the water.

Back in Abbottabad, residents of Bilal Town and dozens of journalists converged on bin Laden’s compound, and the morning light clarified some of the confusion from the previous night. Black soot from the detonated Black Hawk charred the wall of the animal pen. Part of the tail hung over the wall. It was clear that a military raid had taken place there. “I’m glad no one was hurt in the crash, but, on the other hand, I’m sort of glad we left the helicopter there,” the special-operations officer said. “It quiets the conspiracy mongers out there and instantly lends credibility. You believe everything else instantly, because there’s a helicopter sitting there.”
After the raid, Pakistan’s political leadership engaged in frantic damage control. In the Washington Post, President Asif Ali Zardari wrote that bin Laden “was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone,” adding that “a decade of cooperation and partnership between the United States and Pakistan led up to the elimination of Osama bin Laden.”

Pakistani military officials reacted more cynically. They arrested at least five Pakistanis for helping the C.I.A., including the physician who ran the immunization drive in Abbottabad. And several Pakistani media outlets, including the Nation—a jingoistic English-language newspaper that is considered a mouthpiece for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or I.S.I.—published what they claimed was the name of the C.I.A.’s station chief in Islamabad. (Shireen Mazari, a former editor of the Nation, once told me, “Our interests and the Americans’ interests don’t coincide.”) The published name was incorrect, and the C.I.A. officer opted to stay.
The proximity of bin Laden’s house to the Pakistan Military Academy raised the possibility that the military, or the I.S.I., had helped protect bin Laden. How could Al Qaeda’s chief live so close to the academy without at least some officers knowing about it? Suspicion grew after the Times reported that at least one cell phone recovered from bin Laden’s house contained contacts for senior militants belonging to Harakat-ul-Mujahideen, a jihadi group that has had close ties to the I.S.I. Although American officials have stated that Pakistani officials must have helped bin Laden hide in Abbottabad, definitive evidence has not yet been presented.

Bin Laden’s death provided the White House with the symbolic victory it needed to begin phasing troops out of Afghanistan. Seven weeks later, Obama announced a timetable for withdrawal. Even so, U.S. counterterrorism activities inside Pakistan—that is, covert operations conducted by the C.I.A. and JSOC—are not expected to diminish anytime soon. Since May 2nd, there have been more than twenty drone strikes in North and South Waziristan, including one that allegedly killed Ilyas Kashmiri, a top Al Qaeda leader, while he was sipping tea in an apple orchard.

The success of the bin Laden raid has sparked a conversation inside military and intelligence circles: Are there other terrorists worth the risk of another helicopter assault in a Pakistani city? “There are people out there that, if we could find them, we would go after them,” Cartwright told me. He mentioned Ayman al-Zawahiri, the new leader of Al Qaeda, who is believed to be in Pakistan, and Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric in Yemen. Cartwright emphasized that “going after them” didn’t necessarily mean another DEVGRU raid. The special-operations officer spoke more boldly. He believes that a precedent has been set for more unilateral raids in the future. “Folks now realize we can weather it,” he said. The senior adviser to the President said that “penetrating other countries’ sovereign airspace covertly is something that’s always available for the right mission and the right gain.” Brennan told me, “The confidence we have in the capabilities of the U.S. military is, without a doubt, even stronger after this operation.”
On May 6th, Al Qaeda confirmed bin Laden’s death and released a statement congratulating “the Islamic nation” on “the martyrdom of its good son Osama.” The authors promised Americans that “their joy will turn to sorrow and their tears will mix with blood.” That day, President Obama travelled to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where the 160th is based, to meet the DEVGRU unit and the pilots who pulled off the raid. The SEALs, who had returned home from Afghanistan earlier in the week, flew in from Virginia. Biden, Tom Donilon, and a dozen other national-security advisers came along.

McRaven greeted Obama on the tarmac. (They had met at the White House a few days earlier—the President had presented McRaven with a tape measure.) McRaven led the President and his team into a one-story building on the other side of the base. They walked into a windowless room with shabby carpets, fluorescent lights, and three rows of metal folding chairs. McRaven, Brian, the pilots from the 160th, and James took turns briefing the President. They had set up a three-dimensional model of bin Laden’s compound on the floor and, waving a red laser pointer, traced their maneuvers inside. A satellite image of the compound was displayed on a wall, along with a map showing the flight routes into and out of Pakistan. The briefing lasted about thirty-five minutes. Obama wanted to know how Ahmed had kept locals at bay; he also inquired about the fallen Black Hawk and whether above-average temperatures in Abbottabad had contributed to the crash. (The Pentagon is conducting a formal investigation of the accident.)

When James, the squadron commander, spoke, he started by citing all the forward operating bases in eastern Afghanistan that had been named for SEALs killed in combat. “Everything we have done for the last ten years prepared us for this,” he told Obama. The President was “in awe of these guys,” Ben Rhodes, the deputy national-security adviser, who travelled with Obama, said. “It was an extraordinary base visit,” he added. “They knew he had staked his Presidency on this. He knew they staked their lives on it.”

As James talked about the raid, he mentioned Cairo’s role. “There was a dog?” Obama interrupted. James nodded and said that Cairo was in an adjoining room, muzzled, at the request of the Secret Service.

“I want to meet that dog,” Obama said.

“If you want to meet the dog, Mr. President, I advise you to bring treats,” James joked. Obama went over to pet Cairo, but the dog’s muzzle was left on.

Afterward, Obama and his advisers went into a second room, down the hall, where others involved in the raid—including logisticians, crew chiefs, and SEAL alternates—had assembled. Obama presented the team with a Presidential Unit Citation and said, “Our intelligence professionals did some amazing work. I had fifty-fifty confidence that bin Laden was there, but I had one-hundred-per-cent confidence in you guys. You are, literally, the finest small-fighting force that has ever existed in the world.” The raiding team then presented the President with an American flag that had been on board the rescue Chinook. Measuring three feet by five, the flag had been stretched, ironed, and framed. The SEALs and the pilots had signed it on the back; an inscription on the front read, “From the Joint Task Force Operation Neptune’s Spear, 01 May 2011: ‘For God and country. Geronimo.’ ” Obama promised to put the gift “somewhere private and meaningful to me.” Before the President returned to Washington, he posed for photographs with each team member and spoke with many of them, but he left one thing unsaid. He never asked who fired the kill shot, and the SEALs never volunteered to tell him. ♦

Quote of the Decade

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government can not pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that, "the buckstops here.'

Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership.

Americans deserve better.

-- Senator Barack H. Obama, March 2006

Speaking up cuz I'm fed up.

I've told my children all of their lives that if you don't speak up about issues, then you have no right to speak up about the outcome. I've written a letter of my own advice. feel free to cut n paste and send it yourself to your representatives?
it's got some "outrage" in it. and a bit of grammar that is less than polite?

July 14, 2011

US rep Nancy Pelosi
US rep John Boehner
US rep Mac Thornberry
US senator Kay Hutchinson
US senator John Cornyn

All of You in Washington:

We have a nation that is about to completely fall apart in the next two weeks if something positive isn't done. I cannot sit by quietly any longer.

I won't endear this letter by addressing you as Dear Sir or Madam, and certainly not Honorable. You and all of your son-of-a-b%&ch comrades up there are the most dishonorable people I can think of. For the female members, the term madam might apply because you do work in a whore house with the rest.. The male members should all probably be called pimps.

This bul#$*it that you all . . .of both parties . . .and both whorehouses of congress have gotten this country into is inexcusable. If I had a election recommendation for anyone, or any party, for the next election, I would tell them to vote for anyone except an incumbent. The whole lot of you are not worth the bacterial breeding value of a used tampon.

This country is facing so many problems that demand attention and you all sit around just staring at the less urgent problems, holding hearings on steroids and seat belts, and you blame the other party for the federal budget problems not being solved. Or, you blame the president for everything. Or the president blames congress. Or both of you blame the unions, or liberals, or conservatives, or anyone else you can think of. (And by the way, I do know correct grammar and capitalization. Except, in the present era, neither congress or the office of the presidency are worthy today of having their official names get a capital C or capital P. The only capital letters any of you deserve is to get letters addressed to you in ALL CAPS FOR EMPHASIS ON POINTING OUT YOUR IGNORANCE, GREED, AND CORRUPTION.)

No longer do you represent the people who elected you. You really don't even represent special interest groups. You represent only your own self-interest. You are the sorriest excuse for human beings I can think of. You are lower in the life cycle than the hair on the wart on the chin of the parasite that grows on the plant that feeds on the whale-poop at the bottom of the ocean. ALL OF YOU! I have come to see that there is not a dime’s worth of difference in the two parties and their members. You just differ a bit in your approach to corruption and theft of the public’s future.

I hope someday that your own spouse and children look at you each night and spit at you in disgust of the miserable person you are, and have been. I hope you go to bed at night wondering what the tallest building is in Washington that has windows that open so you can plan how and when to take your own leap.

A few years ago the term Moral Hazard became wildly popular to describe events on Wall Street. Today that term can only be applied to you and every other washington politician. You and your cronies on both sides of the isle and in the white house are THE greatest moral hazards facing America today. You should all be sent to prison to be bent over as someone's bi#%h for the next 20 years. You all are the cancer that is killing us. You are the ones primarily responsible for the decline of morals and the work ethic and values in America today. If we were allowed to tar-and-feather in today’s society, I’d have the biggest brush in my hand and ask for the pleasure of applying yours.

Now we have a debt ceiling stalemate in this country. And if not solved in the next week, I understand it could throw the entire economic system of this country into a meltdown and our entire economy and way of life as we know it would be lost. It will be Biblical in its scale of catastrophe and suffering. And yet, you are all sitting on your stubborn asses and failing to give an inch to get the problem solved? What in the hell are you thinking? Where is the moral outrage in the halls of congress? It’s absent. Because you yourselves have lost the moral highground.

And now I hear, to solve the problem, some of you want to cut future social security or medicare payments and benefits? Or change the age of eligibility? You sorry piece of afterbirth! Let me tell you something butthole. I'm 61 years old and have paid into that bottomless pit now for about 43 years. And now, you're going to change the rules? How about this fecesface? I will lay down on this issue and say "fine". Cut them. And raise the age to 67 if that's what it takes to balance the budget. But you cut your own damn benefits there too. Raise my taxes, and raise yours too at the same time. You crooks cut your retirement and raise the age for your own benefits too, and I'll go along with it. Or better yet, get rid of congressional retirement altogether. Where on earth did the idea come from in the first place that being a politician should be a career? You're supposed to be a servant for gosh sakes. But you’ve taken advantage of your office to become like the senators of ancient Rome. . . aristocratic thieves.

I'll go along with about anything that you do that affects us all the same. But stop coming up with the excrement that just singles out one group or another and puts the expense on my back while turning your head to another group (like yourselves) and not slapping them too.

For starters though, before you start trying to take away from me, or tax me more in the remaining years of my earning ability, how about saving a few hundred billion from these money-saving ideas:

1. Stop funding immediately anything to do with bombing Libya. I personally don't care what those people do to each other. They have raped us for a long time on oil prices, and so now, if they decided they are going to be miffedat each other, let them slap each other silly. Ditto and double dittos for Sudan, Angola, Uganda, Micronesia, etc. Let them kill themselves off if they want to. Our money and your committee meetings are not going to stop tribal jealousies that have existed for hundreds of years.
2. Don't send another dime to a single other country that doesn't think the United States is an ally and a wonderful country. Here's the way to tell. Ask each foreign ambassador if they would feel uncomfortable if the Marine Corp guards took the day off from guarding the door to the Embassy. Any that were afraid . . . then no more foreign aid to that country?
3. Get us the hell out of the United Nations. We are their whipping post. Most of the countries there hate us. They take our money and then turn around and either a. Support terrorist to attack us, or b. Take our money and then split it up among their rulers and leaders and give very little for the intended recipients. This is the time for the dawning of a new age of isolationism, and a time for Society Protectionism. Except in this era, the protection is to save our very society and way of life, and the futures of our children and grandchildren.
4. Start random drug testing of welfare recipients? Anyone with a positive drug test is immediately dropped from the roles. FOREVER.
5. Offer a lump sum payment of $5,000.00 to any chronic welfare recipient, male or female, to be sterilized. The future savings would be tremendous.
6. Offer an immediate early discharge from prison to any prisoner who is there for any crime except murder, under the one condition that “if” they are convicted, EVER again of a felony, they would lose any right of appeal and would receive an immediate lethal injection on the evening of their conviction by a jury of their peers. Those in prison for sex crimes would also have to agree to immediate neutering before discharge.
7. Give aid to needy moms with a limit per child. Of course I understand that mothers with children now would have to be exempt for their present number. But for instance, you get $200.00 for one child, and $400.00 for two. But then if you have a 3rd, you drop back to $200.00. If you have a 4th, you lose it all.
8. Identify dead-beat dads who have been dead-beats for one year or more, and neuter them. Same night they are picked up. No trial. Just positive identification and cut their gonads off.
9. Open the border. Get off the backs of the immigrants. I don’t like the idea of rewarding illegal behavior anymore than the next person. But we’ve lost the battle. So let them come on in, get a social security card and start paying taxes. In fact, how about charging a non-citizen an income-tax-premium of say 10% and no deductions? Let’s make some money off them and rescue America. Then amend the constitution to disallow citizenship to children born on American soil of any parent without a verifiable social security number?
10. Stop sending any more money around the globe for any disaster relief. We've got the greatest disaster imaginable right here in our own country. Use taxpayer money to fix America. I don’t care who it is. Tell them, we won’t ask you for your money in our disasters and we don’t have any to send you. Key phrase here egghead, is WE DON’T HAVE ANY TO SEND! I’d love to send a bunch of money to a lot of different needs around the world. But I can’t, because I don’t have the money. Get the message? If you don’t have it, you don’t spend it.
11. Stop selling flood insurance from the government. And don't pay a dime to replace/rebuild/repair any property that is located in the flood zone or below sea level. If people are stupid enough to build homes in areas that are prone to flooding then they need to be stupid enough to pay for the repairs themselves. Next time New Orleans goes under, send the Saints to Omaha. The mid-western states need some pro sports. And bus ½ of the displaced residents to every major city that has lost population in the past ten years, like Detroit and Cleveland. Those cities must already have a lot of empty homes and apartments? Send the other ½ to your back yard there in washington, d.c.
12. Put an additional 5.00 a gallon tax on all gasoline sold in America and use it to begin immediately building mass transit systems in every area of 100,000 persons or more. Europe has lived with 8.00 a gallon gas for years. It won't destroy us. And we will be healthier in the future if we have some alternative to driving so many cars. Learn from Europe and Japan and now China. Get some 220 mph train systems crossing this country and move 1,000 people at a time. Build it elevated in the median of the present interstate highway system where we already own the right-of-way.
13. Tell Detroit and Japan that in 2015, no automobile can be sold in the United States that does not get 25 miles per gallon in the city and 40 on the highway. Give each person a “stimulus” check of a thousand or two if they buy a car that gets 40 or more in the city. Or waive the sales tax on the most efficient? And raise the requirement 1 mpg per year for 10 years. Pickups and SUV's could be 20 and 35. In fact, tell Japan that no more ships of vehicles will be accepted from Japan unless the ship loads back out with an equivalent $$$ amount of US made goods. Same for Germany and any other country sending autos here. Give people a tax credit each year on their tax return of $1,000.00 if they, or no family member even own a car?
14. Raise, over the next 20 years, the retirement age to 67 for ANY benefits. And give companies tax credits to hire people above the age of 60. Example: A company hires a 62 year old employee and pays them 40,000.00 a year? The company not only gets to deduct the payroll costs, but also gets a $2000.00 credit toward their corporate tax. Perhaps 68 year old would get a 600.00 extra credit, and so on. The bonus given to the company would be much cheaper than benefits for a year? Meanwhile, give any adult person in the United States the age of 40 or younger the immediate option to opt out of social security all together and go with a private program. The opt out decision would be irreversible.
15. Here's a BIG SAVER for you. Rogers Clemens is going on trial right now because you damn cry babies in washington think he lied to you about steroids. Guess what asshole. I don't care if he lied to you. Maybe Bryan Gumbo and HBO do? But most Americans don’t. What people care about right now is eating and having a job. So it’s hard for me to believe you spent taxpayer time and money in the first place even investigating our countries second-most overpaid prima donnas (you being the most overpaid). But since you did, and now you think he lied to you because a lying trainer said he did, so you're going to try and spend more money to hang him? Your investigation involved 103 law enforcement officers, five attorneys, 229 investigation reports, from 72 locations across the United States, Germany, and Puerto Rico. WHAT? Do you morons up there have oatmeal for brains. Who gives a flip? The country is about to go down in financial flames and you're spending money trying to prosecute this fellow. And yet, today, 3 years after the wall street debacle began with the collapse of Bear Sterns, not one single prosecution and conviction has taken place of a wall street trading firm that almost brought the country down? Stop spending money on all these committee and subcommittee investigations of steroids, AIDS in Africa, seat belts, global warming and can-Johnnie-read? Spend your time, our money, and your attention on keeping the country safe from enemies invading our shores, rebuilding our deteriorating infrastructure, and promoting the common welfare of the citizens. Those marching orders by the way are from the constitution. EMPHASIS ON THE WORD COMMON. You do things that are good for all of us. Not just your particular warm-n-fuzzy-tree-hugger-of-the-day group. Forget about exploring Mars too. I don't give a rats ass about living on other planets and anyone without a job could care less too.
16. Do not under any circumstances be a part of letting the United States declare war on any other situation. We spend more money fighting the war on drugs than we do on teachers, and . . . as everyone can see. . . we've lost that war. We declared war on illiteracy and our children are getting dumber. We declared war on poverty and 100's of thousands more today are poor. We declared war on terrorism and lost 100's more American fighting men than we have killed who are terrorists. We declared war on foreign energy dependency and today we're more dependent than ever. We declared war on immigration and today have more illegals here than ever with 1,000's more arriving weekly. We lost! So at the very least, make some money from it, and tax them. Here's a GREAT idea for congress. Please get with the president as soon as possible and declare war on Good Government. We'll have the best and greatest government in the world in 20 years.
17. Stop flying around the country first class and in private Air Force jets. Your time as government parasitic officials is no more valuable than my time as a meaningful contributor to society. Today any federal government employee flying over 1,000 miles is automatically allowed a first class seat. WTH? Let them fly coach and maybe they'll take fewer flights. And for goodness sakes . . . Nancy Pelosi using a jumbo jet to fly back and forth to San Francisco? What are you thinking numbnuts? If you all weren't the bunch of leaches that you are, you'd know that money doesn't grow on trees. Someone, somewhere had to actually work and do or make something to send the money to Washington in the first place. Even though you are just money-suckers and drains on our economic society, you should at least respect the value of money. But you spend it like it's yours? You all remind me of Ann Richard's quote about George W. Bush. She said "he was born on 3rd base, and told everyone he hit a triple". You son-of-a-bitches up there are NOT America's aristocracy. You are servants. Act like it.
18. Here’s a novel idea for profit. Each year, when and if you actually file a tax return showing that you paid income tax in, you get your membership card renewed for another year. We’ll call it Uncle Sam’s Club. That card is good for free admission for you and one immediate family member to a variety of places. Married couples filing jointly get two memberships and two guests. Your free admission is to national parks and monuments and museums and such? Also, if you are a retired person who is drawing social security you get automatically renewed each year, because you were a taxpayer. All others pay cash for an entrance fee. Maybe even add some rewards features too? Such as a “at the pump” discount off of the federal tax paid on gasoline? Or special seating on public transportation versus “steerage” for non-taxpayers? Begin attaching a social premium to being a wage earner and contributor and make it “unpopular” to be a welfare recipient.
19. Repeal of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution which allows the direct election of senators by the people in general election. Prior to the 17th Amendment, senators were chosen by the various state legislators and served at their please, subject to their recall. Let’s go back to that and let our representatives in the state capital send individuals who are truly public servants there for a season to represent their states? And bring them back home if they aren’t doing their jobs.
20. Passage of the 28th Amendment to the Constitution. It would be: “Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and Representatives; and Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States.
21. And finally, the best for last. You should lower congressional pay after 6 years by 10% a year. You go there and serve 6 years for a pay check. No retirement. No lifetime benefits. Just a paycheck. And in the 7th year, your pay starts going down 10% a year. If you are still there in 16 years, you get nothing. That will clear the place out from time to time.

So there you have it stupid. 21 ideas from a layman like myself. A layman, who . . unlike yourselves . . .works for a living and tries to make money to take care of myself, my family, and pay my employees. I’m a contributor, whereas you are all parasites. I’m also someone that is over taxed and over worked to keep up with the piles of paperwork that you and your cronies have designed to keep me busy. I’m tired. Very tired, of doing more and more, for less and less, so you can have more and more money to spend on silliness, wastefulness, and welfare, and steroid investigation.

I do hope that you are ashamed of yourselves. But I doubt that you are. You are a disgrace, and pathetic. And as my grandchildren grow up you can be assured that I will speak your name over and over to them as being one of the crooks responsible for stealing their future happiness. You can be assured that in generations to come, your name will be remembered and spoken of in the same vein as Benedict Arnold and Lee Oswald and Bernie Madoff and Joseph Stalin and Son-of-Sam. You are this society's dregs.

If you let this country and it’s economy go down in flames in two weeks, I hope there is a mass uprising of the population that comes to Washington and runs you and your pals all out of town on a rail. It’s time, I think, to just clear the plate and start over. You, like a used tampon, have lost your value.

Very, very truly

Bud McElhaney
West Texas Oilfields
BMcElhaney2350@aol.com