
Guy unknowingly live tweets the Osama raid in Abbottabad - Osiris
http://tweetlibrary.com/damon/osamaraidlivetweets
======
zeteo
The Google Maps location that is ventured around (starting with Telegraph:
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8487...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8487772/Osama-
bin-Laden-dead-killed-yards-from-Pakistans-Sandhurst.html) ) is not the actual
location of the compound.

There are aerial photos of the compound in the briefing obtained by ABC news:

[http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/Graphics%20for%20backg...](http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/Graphics%20for%20background%20briefing.pdf)

Based on these photos and looking around the area, I've found the actual
location of the compound, which exactly matches the photos from the briefing:

[http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&#...</a><p>It's still in
the area, but a bit further from the Pakistan Military Academy and in the SW
direction from it (not NW, as the Telegraph map claims).

~~~
joeguilmette
its interesting that this is in such an urban area. if it happened in some
remote cave it is unlikely that we'd know much about his living conditions -
beyond what the government chose to let us know.

since it is in a city environment such as this neighbors, post-mortems on the
building and things like that will likely give us a much better idea about
what was going on there.

makes you wish the troops had GoPros, doesn't it?

~~~
count
They've got way better than GoPros. You just wont see the video until election
time, when it's 'leaked'.

------
JacobAldridge
The revolution will not be televised. Live, inadvertant, real-time Tweeting on
the other hand...

For all the discussion of business cases for technology like Twitter, let's
spare a moment to reflect on how impressive it is in and of itself for this
sort of event.

~~~
teamonkey
Meanwhile, the event happened too late to feature on today's print media in
the UK.

<http://www.frontpagestoday.co.uk/2011/05/02/archive.cfm>

------
coderdude
So the article about Osama Bin Laden being killed -- which has nearly 800 up-
votes -- is being flagged off the front page, but the article about a guy who
tweets about him being killed is having no problem staying #1.

Then again, so many people had their comments down-voted into light gray in
the original Osama article that I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of
flaggings came from people that wanted to stem their own decline in karma.
That would make for an interesting dataset.

~~~
anthonycerra
I think you're comparing apples to oranges. An article from the mainstream
media about bin Laden's killing is nothing out of the ordinary.

This link, however, is likely the first time in history that something so
covert and meticulously planned has been exposed in real-time by someone
experiencing it himself. We get the opportunity to see it from his perspective
without the media's filters - just raw data. This is incredibly fascinating to
me.

~~~
dkarl
He heard about bin Laden being killed the same way the rest of us did.

~~~
guyzero
But unlike the rest of us, he heard bin Laden being killed.

~~~
dkarl
Ptolemy saw the earth go around the sun every day his whole life. So what?
This guy didn't "expose" anything because he didn't know what was going on
himself. All he heard was helicopters and an explosion. All the rest --
starting with the fact that one of the helicopters was not Pakistani -- was
just gossip he heard nth-hand from eyewitnesses. If Obama had not held a press
conference, he still wouldn't know what happened. What's historic about that?
It's just the standard excitement and local gossip when something dramatic
happens. If he had credibly detailed a piece of information that wasn't
officially released, or if he had reported something interesting before it was
openly announced by the U.S. government, that would have meant something.

~~~
TikiTDO
Sure, it's not really historical, but it is certainly indicative of the new
age. If you look at the top articles right now, not one of them is
particularly important in the grand scheme of things. I think this is surely
more interesting that finding out that some data center management tool that
perhaps a few dozen people on here will ever use has switched to a different
open source license.

------
jessedhillon
Here is his compound on Google Maps:

[http://maps.google.com/maps?q=osama+bin+laden+&hl=en&...](http://maps.google.com/maps?q=osama+bin+laden+&hl=en&view=map&mcsrc=google_reviews&num=10&ie=UTF8&start=20&cid=11196890339658103699&t=h&ll=34.184471,73.246193&spn=0.010331,0.01929&z=16&iwloc=A)

 _BONUS:_ Click "Search Nearby" and enter "PMA Kakul" -- you will see that the
Pakistan Military Academy was just a short trip up the road from his house!

PMA on Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_Military_Academy>

~~~
jonah
This is incorrect info, the actual compound is here:

[http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/video-inside-bin-
lad...](http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/video-inside-bin-ladens-drone-
proof-compound/all/1)

[http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&#...</a>

~~~
jessedhillon
Thanks for the update.

------
nametoremember
Does anyone else think this is not important?

The guy unknowingly tweeted but without an official release we wouldn't have
known it was Bin Laden so it wouldn't have become that important.

~~~
acqq
If the helicopter did crash, it's more than important -- that would mean that
the operation was not as smooth as the official version.

~~~
nametoremember
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13256676>

One helicopter was lost due to "technical failure". The team destroyed it and
left in its other aircraft.

~~~
acqq
Was that in the news before the tweets were found?

And even if they really destroyed it themselves at the end, that also speaks a
lot about the circumstances there. Pakistan government is supposed to support
U.S. but the helicopter has to be destroyed, obviously to keep it from failing
in the hands of Al Quaeda. It's more than interesting.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Not letting military hardware get into other nations' hands is standard
practice. Really, "not trusting the Pakistanis that much" is a sufficient
explanation.

------
ck2
_credit for the leak went to Keith Urbahn, the chief of staff for Donald
Rumsfeld_

How is this not "state secrets" ?

If they do not prosecute him for the leak, it's a double-standard.

~~~
shadowsun7
The NYT on how the bin Laden announcement was leaked to the press:
[http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/how-the-
osa...](http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/how-the-osama-
announcement-leaked-out/)

 _Mr. Urbahn quickly added, “Don’t know if it’s true, but let’s pray it is.”
He was credited by many on the Web with breaking the news, though he did not
have first-hand confirmation.

Within minutes, anonymous sources at the Pentagon and the White House started
to tell reporters the same information. ABC, CBS and NBC interrupted
programming across the country at almost the same minute, 10:45 p.m., with the
news. “We’re hearing absolute jubilation throughout government,” the ABC News
correspondent Martha Raddatz reported._

Seems like the leak was planned, or at least, unpreventable.

~~~
hartror
I can imagine everyone in the government, knowing that the announcement was
imminent were happily let fly with the information.

------
brm
I'm probably going to be downvoted for this but... Increasing the speed at
which our news is delivered is not even necessarily a good thing. Please wake
me when someone invents something that makes it more accurate and unbiased.

~~~
natnat
I think decentralizing the story so that it comes from a bunch of
noninstitutional observers is a pretty good way to get rid of bias. I think it
also helps make news more accurate, in the sense that, in the very short term,
the accuracy of a story is inversely proportional to the time since it
occurred, because people need time to piece information together, and Twitter
and such make distributing all of the relevant facts happen that much faster.

~~~
fluidcruft
> people need time to piece information together

Isn't that what reporters do?

> Twitter and such make distributing all of the relevant facts happen that
> much faster

Twitter certainly makes distributing all of the relevant facts happen that
much faster. It also makes distributing misinformation faster.

~~~
lizzard
Piecing information is what people do, whether they're reporters or not. Many
reporters do great work, but we all need to develop the skills of detecting
misinformation, rather than depending on a professional class to do it for us.

------
sharjeel
He's a friend of mine and he's also into CS. Sometime back he tried startup
stuff but now he is into consultanct.

I've been doing a startup for years and I never made it to front page of
HackerNews, TechCrunch, NY Observer and many other hot places at the same
time.

I've advised him to launch a product ASAP. Its gonna be hot and I'm definitely
gonna invest :P

------
ghiculescu
<http://twitter.com/ReallyVirtual/status/65015803543695360>

Poor guy. I feel sorry for him, the sudden fame must be an unpleasant shock.

~~~
dataminer
and as reported by BBC, he left the city to live in peace and quiet for a
while.

~~~
kaerast
That BBC article makes it sound like they interviewed him. All the quotes
however come from his tweets (verbatim or reworded).

------
MaysonL
Interesting eye-witness account on Al-Jazeera:
[http://english.aljazeera.net/video/asia/2011/05/201152161017...](http://english.aljazeera.net/video/asia/2011/05/201152161017456791.html)

------
joeguilmette
A lot of outlets are calling this Twitter's CNN moment. It'll be interesting
to see if Twitter has the legs to maintain this crowd sourced news momentum
that it has been building.

~~~
brk
I tend to disagree with this.

The benefit to CNN is that almost every household had/has access to CNN. It's
some channel on basic cable, even if you didn't regularly watch it, it was
easy to find and was pushing the same news out to everyone.

Twitter on the other hand is not as simple to just start using. You need to
sign up, and then find the right people to follow (granted, Twitter does try
to make this easier), but for any given event it's hard to find in real time a
tweetstream that is going to be _better_ than just watching CNN or other major
news outlet. On top of that, Twitter is filled with parody accounts, people
making stuff up, and lots of other noise.

~~~
lreeves
That's a pretty narrow view of global access to things. Yes, probably most
households in the US have access to CNN - but I'd bet a much larger slice of
the planet has Internet access and therefore can reach Twitter.

~~~
brk
s/CNN/BBC/ or whatever. I bet more people still have access to broadcast news
than they do to Twitter.

~~~
noahlt
Half of the world has SMS access and can therefore use Twitter.

~~~
brk
And how would they functionally leverage an SMS-only Twitter feed to get
breaking info to something like this?

Yes, conceptually a lot of people have access to Twitter. However, from a
practicality standpoint my personal opinion is that it's not very effective
tool for a scenario like this.

------
Aqwis
Are we sure that this is genuinely the Osama raid? I've read reports that
Osama was in fact killed days ago. If he was in fact killed yesterday, have
they really already buried his body at sea?

~~~
Deestan
> I've read reports that Osama was in fact killed days ago.

Interesting. Can you provide links?

~~~
Aqwis
No, and I admit that it might very well be wrong. I read this on Slashdot and
reddit (I can find some specific comments if you'd like), which obviously are
not very reliable sources. But the articles I've read haven't mentioned when
he died at all (unless I've somehow missed it), which obviously generates
rumours.

Edit: According to harshpotatoes I am wrong, so please disregard this.

~~~
fredleblanc
For what it's worth, last night -- before and after the presidential address
-- on the bottom of a bunch of TV channels (ESPN for one) the reports were
that the operation was carried out last week, not yesterday afternoon. You may
have been wrong, but you certainly aren't crazy. :)

------
keeptrying
I wonder when photographic proof will be available?

~~~
mgkimsal
Or if his birth certificate will be shown.

~~~
middus
Nope, death certificate. In long form!

------
templaedhel
I was under the understanding from the briefings that he was killed via action
on the ground by US soldiers, with intelligence from drones. This does not
corroralate with that account, it makes it seem like there was an airstrike
from a drone. How do these fit together in the timeline of the raid?

~~~
YooLi
The tweets clearly say he heard helicopters. That's how the US soldiers get on
the ground and leave. Nothing in the tweets sounds like a drone attack.

------
vl
I fail to see how this is newsworthy. Why bunch of mainstream media
broadcasted this story, why is it on HN? There is just no news in this story,
guy saw a helicopter and tweeted, that's it.

------
nitro9590
the irony is that he has been buried without any autopsy/DNA test in sea.and
moreover, there is no sea around Abbottabad and in Afghanistan either maybe
they took him to Karachi or somewhere and As a pakistani and Muslim i want to
clear that we have no tradition to bury a body in sea.

~~~
Tomek_
NYTimes:

"Muslim tradition requires burial within 24 hours, but by doing it at sea,
American authorities presumably were trying to avoid creating a shrine for his
followers." [[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/world/asia/osama-bin-
laden...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/world/asia/osama-bin-laden-is-
killed.html)]

"It was 3:50 on Sunday afternoon when President Obama received the news that
Bin Laden had tentatively been identified, most likely after a series of DNA
tests."
[[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/world/asia/02reconstruct-c...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/world/asia/02reconstruct-
capture-osama-bin-laden.html)]

~~~
cosmicray
One thing that isn't particularly clear, is the timestamps on tweet library.
Based on the top entry, I presume those are UTC. So if the action kicked off
at 1 AM PST (UTC+5 according to wiki), then it would have been 4 PM EDT
(UTC-4) in Washington. 3:50 PM doesn't jive with this (unless Pakistan is on
DST).

Another article said that the burial at sea was completed by 2 AM EDT (so they
presumably were done by 3 PM in Pakistan, about 14 hours after the first
tweet).

~~~
Tomek_
Yeah, times didn't hold up in the yesterday's reports, the attack was around
12-1AM in Pakistan as witnesses' reports state so it must have been around
3-4PM in Washington.

Today's news are more accurate on that matter: "At 2:05 p.m., Mr. Panetta
sketched out the operation to the group for a final time. Within an hour, the
C.I.A. director began his narration, via video from Langley. “They’ve crossed
into Pakistan,” he said."
[[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/world/asia/03intel.html?pa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/world/asia/03intel.html?pagewanted=3)]

------
Maro
So, was the heli shot down in the OBL assassination operation? Does that mean
that this was not a secret/covert operation?

~~~
jonknee
What does losing a helicopter have to do with it being a covert operation?
Special forces use helicopters all the time. The official story is they
brought two helis, had a mechanical failure with one, destroyed it and then
left in the remaining unit.

~~~
Maro
I guess I mistakenly thought covert means secret, without helicopters hovering
over the city and people tweeting about it.

~~~
jonknee
It was covert enough that no one knew who the target was until well after the
event. The neighbors knew something happened, but had absolutely no idea what.

------
matthewcieplak
Wow, they couldn't have found a more gracious accidental celebrity.

------
napierzaza
This is of course how non-tech things can leak in HN. The tertiary technical
angle. Are we amazed that people in Pakistan have Twitter?

------
harryf
Wag the Dog anyone?

