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Paul Holmes: Daring raid brightens May's beauty
By Paul Holmes Email Paul 5:30 AM Saturday May 7, 2011
Hawkes Bay's had some bad weather lately. The parts affected were
mainly on the coast, from Haumoana, round Cape Kidnappers and places
south, a wild salt-sprayed coast of wild romance.
I see the camping ground at Te Awanga was flooded. It was always the
place for our annual primary school picnic.
If my memory is correct, only twice was the camping ground not flooded
on picnic day and the picnic not cancelled. I can never understand why
they persist with it.
This week's weather has been more than splendid. I don't recall a
first week of May in Hawkes Bay every being as red and golden, green
and yellow, as sunny and blue and still and calm and warm, as this has
been. This may be the loveliest autumn I can remember.
Years ago, I planted a non-fruiting grape over our old shed. This week
in the late afternoon sun it is a lurid, breathtaking mass of red,
purple and yellow.
Plus they got bin Laden, Hone Harawira's freedom fighter. They blew
half his face off.
In what will become a commando raid of legend, the Americans, having
figured out through brilliant analysis of intelligence that he was
holed up in a huge compound in a town nestled under the hills north of
Islamabad, flew in and killed him. Just like that. Took the mass
killer out.
The Pakistanis are indignant at not being trusted with information
about the operation by the Americans. Well, the stakes were too high
for the Americans to tell the Pakistanis. Heaven knows who the
Pakistani Intelligence Service works for.
As Leon Panetta, the CIA boss says, the Pakistanis either knew bin
Laden was there or they are incompetent. Abbottabad is a military
town, after all. They knew, all right.
And should the Americans have gone in to kill him? Of course they
should have. Should they have executed him summarily, in the way they
did? Of course, yes.
Or should they have arrested him and brought him out alive and sent
him to the States for a fair trial? Of course not. Where would you
have held him? What would the cost of security have been? Where would
you try him?
Paul Holmes: Daring raid brightens May's beauty
By Paul Holmes Email Paul 5:30 AM Saturday May 7, 2011
Hawkes Bay's had some bad weather lately. The parts affected were
mainly on the coast, from Haumoana, round Cape Kidnappers and places
south, a wild salt-sprayed coast of wild romance.
I see the camping ground at Te Awanga was flooded. It was always the
place for our annual primary school picnic.
If my memory is correct, only twice was the camping ground not flooded
on picnic day and the picnic not cancelled. I can never understand why
they persist with it.
This week's weather has been more than splendid. I don't recall a
first week of May in Hawkes Bay every being as red and golden, green
and yellow, as sunny and blue and still and calm and warm, as this has
been. This may be the loveliest autumn I can remember.
Years ago, I planted a non-fruiting grape over our old shed. This week
in the late afternoon sun it is a lurid, breathtaking mass of red,
purple and yellow.
Plus they got bin Laden, Hone Harawira's freedom fighter. They blew
half his face off.
In what will become a commando raid of legend, the Americans, having
figured out through brilliant analysis of intelligence that he was
holed up in a huge compound in a town nestled under the hills north of
Islamabad, flew in and killed him. Just like that. Took the mass
killer out.
The Pakistanis are indignant at not being trusted with information
about the operation by the Americans. Well, the stakes were too high
for the Americans to tell the Pakistanis. Heaven knows who the
Pakistani Intelligence Service works for.
As Leon Panetta, the CIA boss says, the Pakistanis either knew bin
Laden was there or they are incompetent. Abbottabad is a military
town, after all. They knew, all right.
And should the Americans have gone in to kill him? Of course they
should have. Should they have executed him summarily, in the way they
did? Of course, yes.
Or should they have arrested him and brought him out alive and sent
him to the States for a fair trial? Of course not. Where would you
have held him? What would the cost of security have been? Where would
you try him?
No, the Americans wanted him dead. They were always going to get him
and they were always going to kill him. An eye for an eye is a strong
motif in the American narrative.
And, as I've written before, you don't organise the theft of giant,
paid-for American jet airliners full of American people, loaded up
with paid-for fuel and fly them into two of the greatest buildings in
the world and cause them to melt and collapse killing 3000 hard
working American people inside them.
Because if you do, America is going to hunt you down and kill you.
Bin Laden was psycho. He was described this week as a "raging
narcissist." He was an evil murderer. His theology was full of hatred.
There was none of the tolerance which Muslims tell us is part of
Islam. He had within him only blissful hatred. Everything about the
West was contemptible filth.
Never mind Christ and Einstein and Shakespeare and Western charity and
goodness; never mind the Eiffel Tower, or Frank Lloyd Wright and
television and radio and cellphones.
No, all that mattered to bin Laden was hatred. I'm not sure he ever
proposed anything. He was someone who opposed and destroyed and tore
down and murdered and massacred.
There are certain people to whom the rules of law and life do not
apply. There are certain people who simply have to be killed and
thrown to the sharks, as the Americans did to bin Laden this week.
People who organise such horrific massacres as the World Trade Centre
was, have to be hunted down like rats and killed.
I was wondering how they were able to make an assessment about bin
Laden's DNA. Here's how. Last year bin Laden's sister died in a New
York hospital.
The Americans simply took her body. They simply compared his DNA to
hers. They were determined, those Yanks, weren't they, to get him.
Obama showed strong, resolute leadership. He had the guts to take the
punt, to order one of the riskiest and most daring military operations
since Entebbe, when the Israelis rescued their hijacked people from
the airport at Kampala, Uganda.
He had the courage that history demands presidents display from time
to time. He made Donald Trump look like a chump with the silliest comb-
over the world has ever seen. Obama showed his seriousness, this week.
Obama certainly isn't agonising over the killing of the beast.
Getting bin Laden, killing him on the spot, executing him in his own
bedroom, has probably guaranteed Obama a second term. Even Republicans
were applauding him this week.
So a beautiful royal wedding one day, bin Laden dead the next. Not a
bad few days.
By Paul Holmes Email Paul
------------------------------
Gerard Otto (Remuera) | 01:05PM Sunday, 08 May 2011
This is a distasteful episode involving killing Bin Laden's son and
others as well. Rejoicing over this is below a civilized society and
the hallmark of people caught up in good sides versus evil sides. When
that is an obvious myth.
The whole thing is also without any shred of evidence that Bin Laden
was responsible for 911. Nothing has altered the foreign policies of
Western Countries that consistently invade and support brutal
dictators in the middle east when it suits them. So this act signifies
more violence to come. You rejoice and celebrate that. But I think
it's all a huge disgrace and a big propaganda show for the masses.
Penny Bright (Kingsland) | 01:05PM Sunday, 08 May 2011 So Paul - you
don't believe in the 'Rule of Law'?
If not - what is the difference between Osama and Obama?
matt edwords (New Zealand) | 01:06PM Sunday, 08 May 2011 I do worry
about you Mr Holmes, as it seems you have become yet another
journalistic dung beetle, with
the in defatigable ability to lap up American propaganda bullsh!t.
Yes, bin Laden was most of the things you say he was, but the United
States is hardly the altruistic & benevolent outfit that their
government, Fox 'news' & yourself would have us believe.
In reality they're more like a de-facto empire of immense military
might, who have controlled much of the world for the last half century
with their subversive foreign policy and c******, shadowy government
agencies such as the CIA and NSA.
In many ways bin Laden was another one of Americas pets that turned
feral. He & his small band of extremists did however provide the U.S
with an excuse to wage war on an entire nation and install yet another
puppet government.
Bin Laden & those 'weapons of mass destruction', somewhat conveniently
also provided previous president George W with the perfect excuse to
carry out daddy's unfinished work in Iraq, with that other ally turned
feral ingrate, Saddam.
But don't worry about balance or dispassionate reporting of the facts,
as your weekly works of fiction are always so much more entertaining.
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