Saturday Shorts

Some of you older fellas here remember the aftermath of when Osama bin Laden was finally terminated – seemed the SEALs involved spent years blowing their own horns about it, right? Reminded me of the old Cold War line that “the difference between classified information and common knowledge is that common knowledge is harder to find.” Well, there’s a bit of controversy about the raid.

A judge is ruling whether a case involving ex-Navy SEAL Robert O’Neill, the man who claims to have shot and killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, will remain in federal court or be remanded to state court.

In November, O’Neill filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit against Tyler Hoover and Brent Tucker—hosts of The Antihero Podcast—claiming that the pair engaged in a years-long effort to disparage the veteran’s name and efforts associated with bin Laden’s demise during Operation Neptune Spear.

Two SEALs involved – Mark Bissonnette and and Robert O’Neill, who each have been represented to have fired the fatal shots.

Mark Owen (a pseudonym for Matt Bissonnette) of the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group, known as SEAL Team Six, wrote No Easy Day. It is described as a “firsthand account” of the planning and execution of the successful May 2, 2011, raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan. It was published in 2012.

O’Neill wrote his own memoir, The Operator, that was published in 2017. His book detailed his 400-plus mission military career and his own competing perspective of the bin Laden raid.  Military.com

Best way to get up to speed on this is to read the linked article. Lot of he-said/she-said to wade through.  I’m just happy that that OBL is roasting in hell.

“I am Spartacus!” (or, for you younger kids whose oldest movie is only a few decades back “I am Zorro!”

H/T to Jeff LPH for this one.

Some ICE fallout from the Pretti shooting.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minnesota have been ordered not to “COMMUNICATE OR ENGAGE” with “AGITATORS” during future operations, according to new internal guidance from the agency’s top brass.

The new instructions, circulated on Wednesday and exclusively reviewed by Reuters, also limit ICE activity to immigrants with criminal charges or convictions in a departure from the broad sweeps that have sparked fierce backlash, legal challenges, and street protests.

I have to say that, if true, this is what ICE should have been doing all along. Supposedly they were only going after the worst of the worst – God knows w have an abundance of them, right? But there have been to many cases of people being arrested as they were going to scheduled court hearings, having their in-process attempts to get legal being interrupted and deportation started, even at least one case of someone who had a minor drug offense many years ago being deported… Were they breaking the law? Sure! In a jaywalking kind of way, maybe, but spending so much time on minor offenders when TdA and  other immigrants gangs are still widely here? Concentrate on the truly bad guys. The memo verbatim purportedly says:

DO NOT COMMUNICATE OR ENGAGE WITH AGITATORS. It serves no purpose other than inflaming the situation. No one is going to convince the other. The only communication should be the officers issuing commands. Mediaite

The article says the ICE agents will use megaphones to clearly announce exactly what they are doing at every step of the way to eliminate confusion and reduce volatility (not sure this will do much good, me.) But this, coupled with Tom Homan being placed in charge of the Minneapolis operations, is definitely a sign of a  pivot on the administrations’s part.

Am I the only one reminded of “Demolition Man”s “Maniac! Get down on the ground!”?

Category: Illegal Immigrants, SEALs