Osama Bin Laden Is DEAD!

[Black Aeronaut]

Eh, to be honest, al-Q's been fairly irrelevant for years now. Not much a small group can actually do when they're hiding in the mountains in Pakistan. I suppose some of that pressure will be off now that the US got the top guy, but it remains to be seen if they even possess enough remaining assets to be a factor in Afghanistan, let alone further afield.

Not as small as your state.  They still have active cells in all the hot spots - most worrisome to me is Somalia and Pakistan.  (In fact, I'm never gonna feel anything but leery about Pakistan until that place has a revolution all its own.)

As far as Bin Laden goes, in theory I'd have preferred it if he'd been
taken alive and tried in a proper court, but LOL at the concept of rule
of law applying to Barack Obama's America.

Oh, as if that never applied to the Bush Jr. administration.  I can point out all kinds of things there.  This is tame by comparison.  Besides, we don't wanna give anyone else any more reason to be mad at us.  Bin Laden got a speedy burial in a place where he can't be enshrined.  And you can be sure that DNA confirmation was made - sure, it usually takes a few days, but that's just the waiting in the line.  You can bet the farm they expedited his DNA profile so it happened within hours.

Despite Bin Laden's general
irrelevance, he had value as a symbol and would certainly have plotted
to kill more people had he remained alive to do so, so it's good he's
gone

Definitely agree with you on that one.  With him out of the way, Al-Q's lost some serious momentum - their figurehead, so to speak.  While the war is going to be far from over (plenty of 2nd-in-commands to snipe) I definitely feel we've hit a mid-way point.