President Obama announced on May 1 that Osama bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan, nearly 10 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. While the dramatic East Wing announcement marked the fulfillment of President George W. Bush's vow to capture the Al Qaeda leader "dead or alive," the cascade of conflicts around the globe that the attacks prompted represent his still-raging legacy.Mr. Obama declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that American military and C.I.A. operatives had finally cornered Mr. bin Laden and shot him to death at a compound in Pakistan.
“For over two decades, bin Laden has been Al Qaeda’s leader and symbol,” the president said in a statement carried on television around the world. “The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat Al Qaeda. But his death does not mark the end of our effort.” He added,
“We must and we will remain vigilant at home and abroad.”
Mr. bin Laden escaped from American troops in the mountains of Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in 2001 and, although he was widely believed to be in Pakistan, American intelligence had largely lost his trail for most of the years that followed. They picked up a fresh trail last August. Mr. Obama said in his national address that it had taken months to firm up that information and that he had determined it was clear enough to authorize a secret operation in Pakistan in the week before it was launched.
The forces attacked the compound in what Mr. Obama called a “targeted operation” that left Mr. bin Laden dead. “No Americans were harmed,” Mr. Obama said. “They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”
President Obama noted that the operation that had killed Mr. bin Laden was carried out with the cooperation of Pakistani officials. But a senior American official and a Pakistani intelligence official said that Pakistani officials had not been informed of the operation in advance.
The fact that Mr. bin Laden was killed deep inside Pakistan was bound once again to raise questions about just how much Pakistan is willing to work with the United States, since Pakistani officials denied for years that Mr. bin Laden was in their country. It also raised the question of whether Mr. Bin Laden’s whereabouts were known to Pakistan’s spy agency.
It was surprising that Mr. Bin Laden was killed not in Pakistan’s remote tribal area, where Mr. Bin Laden was long rumored to have taken refuge, but rather in in the city of Abbottadad, about an hour’s drive drive north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
Background
The first mention of Bin Laden in The New York Times came deep within a 1994 story on Algeria, which described him as "a wealthy Saudi financier who bankrolls Islamic militant groups from Algeria to Saudi Arabia." Two years later, the paper devoted more than 3,000 words to an article about the role of wealthy Saudi businessmen in financing terrorism that focused in large part on Bin Laden. "Officials in several countries, including the United States, say Bin Laden's money, as well as money he has raised, paid for terrorist acts in Europe, Africa and the Middle East against Americans and other Westerners," the article said. Still, he remained little known to the general public until the bombings of embassies in Africa in 1998 and of the destroyer the U.S.S. Cole in 1999 established him and his group, Al Qaeda, as the preeminent terrorist threat to American interests.
By now, of course, Bin Laden's life story is all too well known: his childhood in one of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest families, his decision to join the Islamic resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the growth of Al Qaeda; the failed American attempts to kill him in the late 1990's; his backing of a plot hatched by a lieutenant, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, that grew into the Sept. 11th attacks; his escape from Tora Bora in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan after an American invasion routed the Taliban, his protectors; his success at evading capture ever since. While in hiding, Bin Laden occasionally issued new threats against the United States.
Messages from an Unknown Location
Since escaping American troops in late 2001, Bin Laden issued some 30 messages, in audio, video or electronic text. Intelligence officials believe they were passed from hand to hand repeatedly to obscure any trail back to his hiding place.
Nearly a decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bin Laden remained a potent symbolic figure. But American officials believed, based on intercepted communications from second- and third-tier Qaeda operatives, that he also was still helping to shape Al Qaeda’s strategy.
Analysts studied the rambling messages for clues to his whereabouts, and the releases gave clues about what Bin Laden was reading and thinking. The pronouncements sometimes bragged of past plots or warned of new ones, and most attracted only fleeting media attention. His less menacing comments, like an October 2010 missive calling for disaster relief to Pakistan, appeared intended to show that his concerns extended beyond scheming violence against those he saw as enemies of Islam.
Wherever he hid, he followed the news closely. A 2007 message carped that Democratic control of Congress had not ended the war in Iraq (he blamed “big corporations”), complained that the Bush administration was not moving against global warming and commended the writings of Noam Chomsky, the leftist professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In eight messages in 2009, he remarked on the tensions between Georgia and Russia, recommended Jimmy Carter’s book supporting Palestinian rights and cited two American professors’ book criticizing the pro-Israel lobby.
His mention of a book said to be by a former Central Intelligence Agency officer that Bin Laden called “The Apology of a Hired Killer” set off a guessing game — including at the C.I.A. — for which of several books with similar titles he might have in mind.
A January 2010 message discussed climate change, even referring by last name to James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist who has warned of global warming. In March, in a brief statement directed to Americans, he warned that executing Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other prisoners accused of planning the Sept. 11 attacks would prompt Al Qaeda to kill any Americans in its custody.
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