> And their success rate should be and is, pretty high.
Is it?
We obviously don't get most reporting, but of the publicly known missions, the success rate is abysmal, and even the "successes" are disasters.
Take the death of bin Laden, "Operation Neptune Spear", a nominal success in that bin Laden may have been killed, it was operationally questionable _and_ it was 9 years after another spectacularly failed mission involving SEALs ("Operation Anaconda") allowed bin Laden's escape, which in turn was following the disastrous Battle of Tora Bora which was the first major failure in a war respite with them.
None of these operations were daring acts of brave men. They were all - like the one in the article - full of cowardly acts and human rights abuses, from deliberately killing civilians to using fake healthcare workers to collect DNA samples (which has caused and continues to cause thousands of deaths due to the ongoing suspicion of childhood vaccines in Pakistan) to the torture of enemy soldiers and civilians alike in secret prisons to shooting an eight-year-old girl in the neck (Nawar al-Awlaki).
> they’re highly-trained for high-risk missions and taking calculated risks with massive amounts of intelligence work and contingency planning beforehand
That's certainly the Hollywood version, but the reality doesn't match up.
Neptune Spear was a culmination of intelligence failures that spanned decades, so while certainly possible, absent other evidence I don't think a press release is sufficient to say that bin Laden was successfully killed in Abbottabad, as opposed to say dying of kidney failure in the years before.
Died peacefully in his sleep was not a suitable ending for the mastermind of 9/11, so it would never have been allowed to happen, even if the truth had to be bent to achieve it.
Most of the cited sources come from the U.S. military, government, or intelligence community. These institutions have a long record of politically expedient deception - from WMD in Iraq, to the Gulf of Tonkin, to the bombing of the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza - so their claims should not be taken at face value.
The Letters from Abbottabad also fall into this category. Their timing and content are unusually convenient for the U.S. narrative, and there is no independent verification of their authenticity beyond U.S. release.
The Abbottabad Commission’s findings were limited. It was unable to independently verify bin Laden’s residence in Abbottabad except via U.S. assertions. What it did conclude was that Pakistani authorities had no prior knowledge of his presence or of the American raid.
It’s also worth noting that the claim bin Laden was “martyred” by U.S. forces was desirable for Al-Qaeda’s own propaganda purposes. It provided them with a rallying narrative regardless of the underlying facts.
So when you ask whether there is “stronger evidence he wasn’t killed,” the point is that there is no independent evidence either way. What we have are uncorroborated U.S. claims and propaganda statements from Al-Qaeda for whom his death at the hands of the US was a propaganda boon. Neither of which can be treated as reliable proof.
In fact, the level of evidence is comparable to other cases where U.S. authorities presented certainty that later collapsed - such as the claim that the Al-Shifa plant in Sudan produced VX nerve agent, or that Pat Tillman was killed by enemy fire. Both were asserted as fact by the U.S. military and government until contradictory evidence made the truth undeniable. It would be naïve to assume we are working with reliable sources here.
When French marsouins killed Droukel, one of the first thing they did was take a picture, then sent it to their friends in the navy, operational security be damned (and from what I've heard, that triggered a lot of jokes). The french troops there were more or less aware of the kill way before it was confirmed, which took days. It might be because Seals are tighter at opsec than Marsouins for sure, and that the Cia was ready to confirm the kill while Droukel was less prepared, but the timeline is for sure extremely tight. Still think it happened, I just think the whole story lacks information on insiders.
Yeah, agreed that on the balance of probabilities, it happened more or less as described. But I also think the strongest evidence for that is that Trump didn't use any discrepancy to attack the prior Obama administration in his first term.
Is it?
We obviously don't get most reporting, but of the publicly known missions, the success rate is abysmal, and even the "successes" are disasters.
Take the death of bin Laden, "Operation Neptune Spear", a nominal success in that bin Laden may have been killed, it was operationally questionable _and_ it was 9 years after another spectacularly failed mission involving SEALs ("Operation Anaconda") allowed bin Laden's escape, which in turn was following the disastrous Battle of Tora Bora which was the first major failure in a war respite with them.
None of these operations were daring acts of brave men. They were all - like the one in the article - full of cowardly acts and human rights abuses, from deliberately killing civilians to using fake healthcare workers to collect DNA samples (which has caused and continues to cause thousands of deaths due to the ongoing suspicion of childhood vaccines in Pakistan) to the torture of enemy soldiers and civilians alike in secret prisons to shooting an eight-year-old girl in the neck (Nawar al-Awlaki).
> they’re highly-trained for high-risk missions and taking calculated risks with massive amounts of intelligence work and contingency planning beforehand
That's certainly the Hollywood version, but the reality doesn't match up.