Obama: strengthened as bin Laden is gone

CSMS Magazine Staff Writers

As the news broke their airwaves, thousands of people took to the street to celebrate. The death of America’s enemy number one becomes real as images of the bloody room from the mansion where bin Laden had been living. For ten years, bin Laden evaded US intelligence as everyone thought he was living in a cave somewhere in the rugged mountain in Afghanistan.

Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, also took part in the operation reported controlled US Navy Seals—a boost for Obama. But it would be extremely impossible to comprehend why the ISI, reputed as one of the best in the world was never informed of bin Laden’s presence in Abottobad, a city just 90 miles of Islamabad and just a few block from Pakistani military headquarters.

Obama: the victor

In the aftermath of the Bin Laden killing, President Barack Obama is poised to gain, and gain big. It is not that Obama would have liked to publicize such huge political gain, but we are in an electoral season and one can be certain that political—whether one likes it or not—is going to be written all over it. Donald Trump and other fringe elements of the republican right are the happy campers. They would have liked to be the ones to make such historic announcement.

Obama looked victorious as he spoke to the nation. What he did not say was whether bin Laden was killed alone or if other people were killed along side with him. But according to CNN, 4 other people may have also been killed with him. CNN said that a woman and 3 men who were with bin Laden inside a heavily guarded compound were also killed.

Obama did say, however, that the US took custody of the body to make his assertion unequivocal. One does not kill a terrorist of such magnitude and inject the truth inside people’s mind without the body to prove it.

Key facts about Osama bin Laden

Here are some key facts about Osama bin Laden, who U.S. officials said late Sunday has been killed and his body recovered by U.S. Authorities.

Bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia in 1957, one of more than 50 children of millionaire construction magnate Mohamed bin Laden. His first marriage was to a Syrian cousin at the age of 17, and he is reported to have at least 23 children from at least five wives.

Convinced that Muslims are victims of U.S.-led terrorism, bin Laden is blamed for masterminding a series of attacks on U.S. targets in Africa and the Middle East in the 1990s. His family, which became rich from the Saudi construction boom, disowned him, and he was stripped of his Saudi citizenship.

He fought in the U.S.-funded insurgency in the 1980s against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, where he founded al Qaeda. He returned to Afghanistan in the 1990s after being forced to leave Sudan where he had been stationed. There, he trained Islamist militants from across the world in camps allowed to function by the ruling Taliban.

Tall, gaunt and bearded, bin Laden was unhurt by U.S. missile strikes on his Afghan camps after the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa. According to some reports, he was nearly killed by a U.S. bomb when militants were being hunted late in 2001 in the Tora Bora mountains in eastern Afghanistan.

Bin Laden approved the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States in which nearly 3,000 people died, saying later that the results had exceeded his expectations. With a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head, he then evaded the world’s biggest manhunt for a decade, with tens of thousands of U.S. and Pakistani troops looking for him.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in December 2009 that the United States does not know where bin Laden has been hiding and has not had any good intelligence on his whereabouts in years.

More than 60 messages have been broadcast by bin Laden, al Qaeda’s number two Ayman al-Zawahri, and their allies since the September 11 attacks in 2001.

In a Sept, 2007 video marking the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks bin Laden said the United States was vulnerable despite its economic and military power, but he made no specific threats. (Writing by Mark Trevelyan and David Cutler, London Editorial Reference Unit, Editing by William Maclean)

Note: These facts were taken from Yahoo News.