As WUWT commenter “Andrew30” puts it, “the silence is telling”. The biggest story in the world today happens in their own backyard, and they don’t report it?
See for yourself at the Pakistan Daily Times: http://www.dailytimes.com.pk
So much for a “new voice for a new Pakistan” I suppose. Gaddafi’s NATO air strike seems to be OK though.
I wonder if the Hyatt Regency knows they are advertising on this site?
Here’s a great backstory on the whole thing:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_exclusive/the-secret-team-that-killed-bin-laden (h/t to Steve Mosher via Facebook)
UPDATE: about six hours after this was posted, a story finally showed up on the website. http://www.dailytimes.com.pk Maybe they are just slow, but there hardly seems to be a newsroom in the world that didn’t race to get this story up, arguably, one of the biggest in the last decade – Anthony
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The Monday edition of the Pakistani Daily Times closed much before the news of OBL’d death were made public. Apparently they have not updated it during Monday. Look tomorrow (Tue).
On another topic, I have stayed at the Islamabad Hyatt R., quite a delightful place indeed, and find it quite natural they advertise in this newspaper.
Yeah, a google search “site:dailytimes.com.pk osama” focused on the last week turned up only four links and none about osama’s death. Guess they are very nervous about publishing news that ends in chaos.
http://www.google.ca/#sclient=psy&num=10&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&tbo=1&prmdo=1&tbs=qdr:d&source=hp&q=site:dailytimes.com.pk+osama&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&prmdo=1&tbo=1&fp=260ddf6ef9857ff8
I noticed the same thing last night, quite revealing.
We can save about 2.5 Billion…
STOP US AID !
i missed something. watts the point?
i heard darth vader is dead too! anyone know if thats true?
OBL wished to become a martyr and the US granted that wish.
What does this mean for the future?
–Greater political unrest in the region?
–Or a greater stability thruought the world?
–Is Al-Quida to be shut down and disbanded from within?
–Or would the reports of OBL’s death at the hands of an American attack be the signal to ALL sleeper cells to activate and
——-begin blowing themselves up worldwide?
Only time will tell for certain. We will see if, in a few weeks time, the nutjobs start their holy war.
Since Bin-Laden didn’t blow himself up in a suiside attack on America, does he still get the 72 virgins?
Baaaad Boy
Andrew30 & Anthony,
Aljazeera website reported that :
[ http://blogs.aljazeera.net/live/asia/live-blog-osama-bin-laden-killed-us-forces ]
Note: Pakistan is at GMT+5, so by 10:46 am in Pakistan at least 2 Pakistani TV stations were reporting OBL death, according to Aljazeera.
So ,although the newspaper “Daily Times” was not reporting OBL death, at least some Pakistani TV networks were aparently showing his death.
John
“Sober satisfaction” says it best, I think.
And I wouldn’t hold your breath, either. Speculation has it that bin Laden was in an ISI “safe house”, right in the middle of a military town, not 1,000 feet from a military complex, about an hour’s drive north of the capital. And all this time the Pakastani leaders were telling the US that he had to be someplace in Afghanistan. Sure…. Youbetcha!
Good spin takes time.
A local commentator summed it up well, I think, although it applies mainly to Pakistan’s authorities rather than to the media. They’re in a bind because if they say that they helped the Americans hunt down OBL, they will anger islamist militants, and if they say they didn’t, they look like a banana republic. Safer to talk less about it.
Tomorrows headlines:
Osama not taken alive, huge setback for trial lawyers….
…Biden finally let out of closet and tape removed from mouth
film at 11:00
OBL has been dead for years. So why announce it now? Why have the body conveniently buried at sea? Trust us we got him! Trust is in short supply these days, almost as short as truth.
Simple answer (and quite cynical) is that they plan to boost Obama’s ratings so with OBL dead, the Taliban defeated and a democratically elected government running things the USA can declare victory and withdraw most of its troops to more needed areas. Libya & Syria? Where the rebels can’t find poop in an outhouse and will require ground “supervisors” to win/liberate/whatever.
Yes the military industrial complex has milked this Afghanistan thing for as much as it can get out of it so on to the new and more profitable wars! Yes the wars will go on and on and dictators will be put into power and then thrown out when their usefulness is used up. Bummer for them. Bummer for all the troops that die.
War is a Racket – Gen. Smedley Butler
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
Smedley was dead right with his take of that issue. It has only gotten worse since his time. RIP general, you tried to warn us.
Last week EU decided upon to ease up the flight security so that people now can bring on the liquid, like tasty liquor, 130, flammable, proof of Scotish pure spirits, from some islamic countries outside of EU no less. Now we know why? Paradoxical though is that Americans are not allowed to do the same, but, supposedly, the Canadians are. It’s like the rest of the world knew, except the Americans. :p
Obama was a myth that could no longer be sustained. Get real do you really believe what the MSM tells you. It was time to end the myth that’s all. Given the coverage of AGW and WMD before the Iraq invasion and now this media circus, I would say the PDT has it about right.
Chris
In fairness, the other Pakistani paper that I surf to: “The Dawn” http://www.dawn.com/ put up a sign that said that they were having so much traffic that they had to redirect you to a secondary site. Once they did, they had the story of OBL. I would not judge Pakistan by that one paper, that is why I look at 2 of them.
Looks like the place OBL was hiding was an ISI safe house. Pakistan says OBL isn’t in Pakistan and then when he is found in Pakistan, he is in a ISI safe house. Not surprised there isn’t much news about it in the Paki news papers.
Osama bin Laden has been killed….
How very convenient
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-very-convenient.html
This operation was hugely embarrassing for the Pakistan government because
a) Bin Laden was in their country.
b) They did not know about it (or if they did, they did not admit to it, I think this explanation is the most likely).
c) It took a foreign power to get rid of him, without informing the Pakistan government whatsoever. Again had they confided in the Pakistanis would Bin Laden have disappeared again?
d) There has been no condemnation of the USA’s attack on Bin Laden from any of the less than radical Islamic countries.
I would be interested to know the views of the Pakistan government regarding the extermination of this particularly nasty piece of vermin
The only other comment I would like to make is that Bin Laden’s death is huge news in the UK. I have been working at home doing jobs around the house during today’s Bank Holiday. I heard about his death at 7:00am on Radio 2 news and it was the leading item on each hourly Radio 2 news bulletin until I turned the radio off at 8:00pm. Every news bulletin on the most listened to radio station in the UK has featured his death as the most important news story for the last 13 hours with comments from David Cameron and many other politicians.
It is BIG, BIG news!!
It seems a little disingenuous to accuse a paper of failing to carry the main headline if it was printed before the story broke. By the same token there is nothing on the British papers about OBL’s death either, although most have updated their websites…
However there is a lot in the Pakistani media about the OBL raid, ‘Dawn’ is as usual good for a diverse overview, at least one writer makes the point that terrorist acts by groups at least inspired if not Al-Queda and OBL have killed around ten times as many Pakistanis as died in the twin towers on 9/11.
On the other hand the army general who removed a (sort of) democratic government and ruled as a dictator and ‘good ally’ of Bush during the Gulf wars is complaining about the abuse of sovereignty…
Where I would predict there will be the deafening sound of silence on this news for some time is the Saudi official news. With its direct links and the threat of internal conflict from those sympathetic to OBL and his repudiation of the Saudi rulers combined with the Arab ‘Jasmine Spring’ risings that pot is one nobody wants to stir.
What is also fascinating is the range of response here. I must admit to a sneaking admiration for the purity of logic and absolute dogma of a poster like ‘ecliptic’ who argues that given that governments/authorities lie about AGW they will clearly lie about ANYTHING for personal/political profit and that therefore they lie about everything. His(her?) conclusion seems to be that therefore everything is just about the reverse of the ‘consensus’ ‘team’ ‘mainstream media’ version of reality.
The admiration is tempered by the recognition of numerous false assumptions and logical errors – never mind the inherent contradictions in such a position….
But there is a problem when the degree credibility you are willing to grant to a source of information becomes dependent on the ideological position you start from. And if that requires you to reject a large body of conventional opinion as intentionally deceitful it is perhaps inevitable that such a judgment begins to infect ALL assessments of information. No knowledge is granted legitimacy; except that which confirms or conforms to a pre-existing bias.
As far as I can see there are only three possible versions of the OBL news.
1) OBL as a real leader of a fundamentalist islamic terror group responsible for inspiring if not initiating a significant number of terrorist attacks was finally tracked and killed by US Navy SEALS. Having obtained sufficient information to be sure to their own satisfaction that they had killed the real OBL, and being quite aware that nothing would satisfy some they avoided endless quibbles and the problem of exhibiting a corpse/prisoner by sea disposal.
2)The Obama administration found a senario where they were confident they could convincingly argue that they had killed OBL. This would require that they were confident there was no risk he would re-appear and prove them wrong or that credible evidence of his earlier death would not emerge and contradict them or that the fake elements are not leaked or detected by people involved in the scam.
Given the speed with which inside information becomes public these days that would seem to imply a very high degree of confidence in the immunity of their fake operation to whistleblowers and refutation.
3)The Obama administration and the whole of the US intelligence community has been taken in by a fake OBL. A decoy planted in Pakistan by ‘Them’. Obama is confident about announcing the death of OBL not because it really is OBL or because he is telling politically motivated lies, but because he and the rest of the people working on this have been brilliantly hoodwinked by a mastermind tactician…
I do understand that politicians and the media have a poor record for full and truthfull disclosure of all information. Often it is partial or inaccurate because those in power try to protect their status or undermine the status of their enemies.
But politicians and the media also have a very poor record of defending the false information that is revealed or preventing the suppressed information from emerging – sooner or later.
Unless you are a die-hard conspiracy theorist who holds that the bigger the LACK of evidence the bigger the truth hidden, then Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy, Russia removed the missiles from Cuba because the US removed missiles from Turkey, they really DID land on the moon and OBL was killed by navy SEALS in an operation approved and overseen by a half-black American president with the middle name ‘Hussein’.
And perhaps not all of what is published about AGW is a giant conspiracy…..
REPLY: It is a website, websites can be updated immediately, as I do several times a day. Print editions with deadlines I can forgive, not websites – Anthony
Funnily enough, the story isn’t in my copy of today’s edition of the (London) Times, either. Doh…
OBL was killed around 1.30am Monday local Pakistan time. The paper cited was Monday’s paper.
It is now about 2.40am Tuesday in Pakistan.
If they publish hardcopy once per 24hrs and if the website simply reflects the hardcopy, ie. not continuously updated, you could not expect the event to be reported before the Tuesday edition.
What do the Pakistanis know that we don’t?
Or, is the Pakistani Press filtering the news, as is the case in ‘other countries’?
To those who are making excuses for the lack of coverage by this paper/website, I think the point is that this is worthy of a “Special Edition”. At least in the free world. Not doing so is indicative of an agenda that we may want to pay attention to in the future.
That said: A toast to the operators who carried out this mission! Job well done!
*shrug* im on the fence about this whole thing. Glad we got him, but im not certain it went down like they said it did.
My gut tells me we KNEW Pakistan was holding him, just not where. So finally we caved and did a secret deal with Pakistan over something, and they finally coughed up the address. Kinda like the Cuban missile crisis where we secretly did an even trade, but all the papers printed it as a great American victory.
Unless you all believe the Pakistani military is that completely incompetent that they didnt realize the guy they were after lived a block down from their version of “west point” for years.
Plus consider Pakistans anti-air defenses, especially around its capital and surrounding region, pretty modern, and one of the most defended in the world. There is no way 4 helicopters could make it though that grid without Pakistan allowing it to happen. So the we did the mission alone without getting permission of pakistan statement is total horsecrap
I didn’t realize that WUWT had become a watchdog for the politics of Pakistani journalism. I am not personally concerned with what a particular newspaper in Pakistan (or Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nepal, Costa Rica, and thousands other daily newspapers around the world) chooses to put on their front page at any particular moment.
It is only passingly interesting, but not, IMHO, here. Here, I just find it odd. If I were a political scientist, an Islamist, or concerned with the politics of sociopathic nations, I would find it more interesting — but then I wouldn’t visit WUWT to find commentary or post my opinions on such a subject. There is enough anti-Islam nonsense on other sites to last several lifetimes.