3. COVER
Killing bin Laden: How the U.S. Finally Got Its
Man
By DAVID VON DREHLE Wednesday, May 04, 2011
A jubilant crowd of mostly college students celebrated in front of the White House the night bin Laden's
death was announced by the President
Brooks Kraft for TIME
The Four Helicopters chuffed urgently through the Khyber Pass, racing over the lights of Peshawar and
down toward the quiet city of Abbottabad and the prosperous neighborhood of Bilal Town. In the dark
houses below slept doctors, lawyers, retired military officers — and perhaps the world's most wanted
fugitive. The birds were on their way to find out.
Ahead loomed a strange-looking house in a walled compound. The pilots knew it well, having trained for
their mission using a specially built replica. The house was three stories tall, as if to guarantee a clear
view of approaching threats, and the walls were higher and thicker than any ordinary resident would
require. Another high wall shielded the upper balcony from view. A second smaller house stood nearby.
As a pair of backup helicopters orbited overhead, an HH-60 Pave Hawk chopper and a CH-47 Chinook
dipped toward the compound. A dozen SEALs fast-roped onto the roof of a building from the HH-60
before it lost its lift and landed hard against a wall. The Chinook landed, and its troops clambered out.
Half a world away, it was Sunday afternoon in the crowded White House Situation Room. President
Barack Obama was stone-faced as he followed the unfolding drama on silent video screens — a drama
he alone had the power to start but now was powerless to control.
At a meeting three days earlier, Obama had heard his options summarized, three ways of dealing with
tantalizing yet uncertain intelligence that had been developed over painstaking months and years. He
could continue to watch the strange compound using spies and satellites in hopes that the prey would
reveal himself. He could knock out the building from a safe distance using B-2 bombers and their
precision-guided payloads. Or he could unleash the special force of SEALs known as Team 6.

4. How strong was the intelligence? he asked. A 50% to 80% chance, he was told. What could go wrong?
Plenty: a hostage situation, a diplomatic crisis — a dozen varieties of the sort of botch that ruins a
presidency. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter authorized a daring helicopter raid on Tehran to free
American hostages. The ensuing debacle helped bury his re-election hopes.
To wait was to risk a leak, now that more than a hundred people had been briefed on the possible raid.
To bomb might mean that the U.S. would never know for sure whether the mission was a success. As for
an assault by special forces, U.S. relations with the Pakistani government were tricky enough without
staging a raid on sovereign territory.
It is said that only the hard decisions make it to a President's plate. This was one. Obama's inner circle
was deeply divided. After more than an hour of discussion, Obama dismissed the group, saying he
wanted time to reflect — but not much time. The next morning, as the President left the White House to
tour tornado damage in Alabama, he paused on his way through the Diplomatic Reception Room to
render his decision: send the SEALs.
On Saturday the weather was cloudy in Abbottabad. Obama kept his appointment at the annual White
House Correspondents' Dinner, where a ballroom full of snoops had no inkling of the news volcano
rumbling under their feet. The next morning, White House officials closed the West Wing to visitors, and
Obama joined his staff in the Situation Room as the mission lifted off from a base in Jalalabad, southern
Afghanistan. The bet was placed: American choppers invaded the airspace of a foreign country without
warning, to attack a walled compound housing unknown occupants.
Obama returned to the Situation Room a short time later as the birds swooped down on the mysterious
house. Over the next 40 minutes, chaos addled the satellite feeds. A hole was blown through the side of
the house, gunfire erupted. SEALs worked their way through the smaller buildings inside the compound.
Others swarmed upward in the main building, floor by floor, until they came to the room where they
hoped to find their cornered target. Then they were inside the room for a final burst of gunfire.
What had happened? The President sat and stared while several of his aides paced. The minutes
"passed like days," one official recalls. The grounded chopper felt like a bad omen.
Then a voice briskly crackled with the hoped-for code name: "Visual on Geronimo."
Osama bin Laden, elusive emir of the al-Qaeda terrorist network, the man who said yes to the 9/11
attacks, the taunting voice and daunting catalyst of thousands of political murders on four continents, was
dead. The U.S. had finally found the long-sought needle in a huge and dangerous haystack. Through 15
of the most divisive years of modern American politics, the hunt for bin Laden was one of the few steadily
shared endeavors. President Bill Clinton sent a shower of Tomahawk missiles down on bin Laden's
suspected hiding place in 1998 after al-Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa. President George
W. Bush dispatched troops to Afghanistan in 2001 after al-Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center and
damaged the Pentagon. Each time, bin Laden escaped, evaporating into the lawless Afghan borderlands
where no spy, drone or satellite could find him. Meanwhile, the slender Saudi changed our lives in ways
large and small, touched off a moral reckoning over the use of torture and introduced us to the 3-oz. (90
ml) toothpaste tube.

5. "Dead or alive," Bush declared in 2001, when the smell of smoke was still acrid, and the cowboy rhetoric
struck a chord. It took a long time to make good on that vow — an interval in which the very idea of
American power and effectiveness took a beating. Thus, to find this one man on a planet of close to 7
billion, to roar out of the night and strike with the coiled wrath of an unforgetting people, was grimly
satisfying. The thousands of Americans across the country whose impulse was to celebrate — banging
drums outside the White House, waving flags at Ground Zero — were moved perhaps by more than
unrefined delight at the villain's comeuppance. It was a relief to find that America can still fix a bull's-eye
on a difficult goal, stick with it year after frustrating year and succeed when almost no one expects it.
Living the Good Life
So he wasn't in a cave after all. Osama bin Laden, master marketer of mass murder, loved to traffic in the
image of the ascetic warrior-prophet. In one of his most famous videotapes, he chose gray rocks for a
backdrop, a rough camo jacket for a costume and a rifle for a prop. He portrayed a hard, pure alternative
to the decadent weakness of the modern world. Soft Westerners and their corrupt puppet princes
reclined in luxury and sin while he wanted nothing but a gun and a prayer rug. The zealot travels light, his
bloodred thoughts so pure that even stones are as cushions for his untroubled sleep.
Now we know otherwise. Bin Laden was not the stoic soldier that he played onscreen. The exiled son of
a Saudi construction mogul was living in a million-dollar home in a wealthy town nestled among green
hills. He apparently slept in a king-size bed with a much younger wife. He had satellite TV. This, most of
all, was fitting, because no matter how many hours he spent talking nostalgically of the 12th century and
the glory of the Islamic caliphate, bin Laden was a master of the 21st century image machine.
He understood the power of the underdog to turn an opponent's strength into a fatal weakness. If your
enemy spans the globe, blow up his embassies. If he fills the skies with airplanes, hijack some and
smash them into his buildings. Bin Laden learned this judo as a mujahid fighting the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan, and he perfected it against the U.S. In 1996 he laid down a marker, literally declaring war on
the world's lone superpower — an incredibly audacious act of twisted imagination. And then, with
patience and cunning, he somehow made the war come true. No Hollywood filmmaker ever staged a
more terrifying spectacle than 9/11, which bin Laden conjured from a few box cutters and 19 misguided
martyrs. When the Twin Towers collapsed, he became the real-life answer to the ruthless, stateless and
seemingly unstoppable villains of James Bond fantasy.
It was necessary, then, to find him and render him mortal again, reduce him to mere humanity — not just
as a matter of justice but as a matter of self-defense. The raid took him down to size. Obama's chief
counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, found himself disgusted by bin Laden in a whole new way:
"Here is bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million-dollar-plus compound,
living in an area that is far removed from the front. I think it really just speaks to just how false his
narrative has been over the years."
Remember that bin Laden once declared, "We love death. The U.S. loves life." Evidently that was a line
he peddled to would-be suicide bombers. For himself, he preferred life in tranquil Abbottabad.
That proved his undoing. In 2005 an unknown benefactor built the strange compound where bin Laden
was eventually found. The site was a triangle-shaped piece of farmland. Walls ranging from 10 ft. (3 m) to

6. 18 ft. (5.5 m) high and topped with barbed wire enclosed the 1-acre (0.4 hectare) property, which lay less
than a mile from the military academy that is Pakistan's answer to West Point. An interior wall 12 ft. (3.7
m) high separated the house from the rest of the grounds. Thus to reach the living areas, it was
necessary to pass through two locked gates. A pit in the yard was used for burning household trash,
leaving nothing for snooping garbage collectors. On the north side of the house, where the windows were
visible, the glass was opaque.
Bin Laden took up residence soon after the compound was finished. Perhaps he knew of other terrorists
in the area. Earlier this year, Umar Patek, an Indonesian linked to the 2002 al-Qaeda bombing in Bali,
was arrested at the home of an Abbottabad retiree. Patek's capture came not long after Pakistani
authorities arrested an alleged al-Qaeda facilitator named Tahir Shehzad. According to documents
published by WikiLeaks, bin Laden's senior lieutenant in the period after Tora Bora, Abu Faraj al-Libbi,
lived for a time in Abbottabad before his capture in 2005 and was visited there by one of bin Laden's
trusted couriers.
But if bin Laden knew that this pretty town with its rolling golf course was home to sympathizers, he
should have surmised that it was also home to his enemies. And a person who truly wants to stay hidden
should not live in a big house behind towering walls in an otherwise sparsely populated field. People are
bound to grow curious — including people working for the CIA.
"Once we came across this compound, we paid close attention to it because it became clear that
whoever was living here was trying to maintain a very discreet profile," a senior U.S. intelligence
operative explained. Brennan summed it up more tersely: "It had the appearance of sort of a fortress."
In Plain Sight
By the time of the raid, Bin Laden had been living in the compound for some five years, surrounded by
members of his extensive family, including the adult son who died with him. Why did it take so long for the
fortress to come under suspicion? Obama's view was clear in his televised address from the East Room
late Sunday night, when he delivered the news of bin Laden's death to a stunned global audience. He
subtly reprised the charge he had made during his campaign for the presidency: the Bush Administration
took its eye off the ball. "Over the last 10 years, thanks to the tireless and heroic work of our military and
our counterterrorism professionals, we've made great strides" in the war against al-Qaeda, he said. "Yet
Osama bin Laden avoided capture."
Obama continued, "And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to
make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al-Qaeda, even as we
continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle and defeat his network."
The implication wasn't lost on Bush's supporters. While the former President and his senior advisers
were quick to praise the successful raid, other Republicans groused about the way it was framed. "That's
Obama politics," Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the ranking Republican on the Senate
Intelligence Committee, told Time. He continued, "I can tell you I was involved in a very close way with
the Bush Administration — Director [Michael] Hayden when he was at the CIA, as well as Director [Porter]
Goss when he was there, and Director [George] Tenet. I know that the focus of everyone in the Bush
Administration was to take out bin Laden irrespective of what it took. They never lost their focus."

7. A larger and more pressing question was the failure of Pakistan to note the terrorist chieftain's luxury digs.
Abbottabad is just 75 winding highway miles (120 km) from the capital, Islamabad, and teems with
Pakistani military brass — current, future and retired. It is home to an entire brigade of the Pakistani army.
How could the world's most wanted terrorist spend five years in a fortress compound under the nose of
the government? White House adviser Brennan said it is "inconceivable" that bin Laden didn't have a
support system inside Pakistan. "The United States provides billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan," says
Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey." Before we send another dime, we need to know
whether Pakistan truly stands with us in the fight against terrorism."
For President Asif Ali Zardari, the charge that Pakistan shielded bin Laden is a personal affront. He
blames the al-Qaeda leader for the murder of his wife, former President Benazir Bhutto, who was, as
Zardari wrote in the Washington Post, "bin Laden's worst nightmare — a democratically elected,
progressive, moderate, pluralistic female leader." Zardari moved quickly after the raid to tamp down
possible protests, noting that the Taliban was blaming him for the al-Qaeda leader's death. "We will not
be intimidated," Zardari declared. "Pakistan has never been and never will be the hotbed of fanaticism
that is often described by the media."
Yet another of the lessons we have learned as a consequence of bin Laden's jihad is that the politics of
Pakistan are Byzantine and double-dealing in ways no spy novelist could conjure. Only a week before the
raid, news reports revealed that Pakistan — a supposed U.S. ally in the war on terrorism — has been
urging Afghan President Hamid Karzai to break with the Americans and team up with China. This is a
government, after all, that manages to fight the Taliban with one arm even as elements of its internal spy
agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, support the Taliban with the other.
As Daniel Markey, a former State Department specialist on South Asia, explains, Pakistan is full of
suspicious characters and fortified homesteads. Government officials often decide that it's better not to
know too much. So as we ask in coming weeks whether forces inside Pakistan protected bin Laden,
pursued him or ignored him, the answer is likely yes to all three. And that should warn us that bin Laden's
death resolves only a part of the twisted, complex drama that is the war on terrorism. Indeed, it may be
the easy part.
From Intel to Capture
The path to bin Laden began in the dark prisons of the CIA's post-9/11 terrorist crackdown. Under
questioning, captured al-Qaeda operatives described bin Laden's preferred mode of communication. He
knew that he couldn't trust electronics, so he passed his orders through letters hand-carried by fanatically
devoted couriers. One in particular caught the CIA's attention, though he was known only by a nickname.
Interrogators grilled 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for details about the courier. When he
pleaded ignorance, they knew they were onto something promising. Al-Libbi, the senior al-Qaeda figure
captured in 2005, also played dumb. Both men were subjected to so-called enhanced interrogation
techniques, including, in Mohammed's case, the waterboard. The U.S. previously prosecuted as torturers
those who used waterboarding, and critics say it violates international treaties. They also argue that
extreme techniques are counterproductive. The report that Mohammed and al-Libbi were more
forthcoming after the harsh treatment guarantees that the argument will go on.

8. Gradually, the courier's identity was pieced together. The next job was to find him. The CIA tracked down
his family and associates, then turned to the National Security Agency to put them under electronic
surveillance. For a long time, nothing happened. Finally, last summer, agents intercepted the call they'd
been waiting for.
The CIA picked up the courier's trail in Peshawar and then followed him until he led them to the
compound in Abbottabad. Now the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency trained a spy satellite on the
triangular fortress. Over time, despite the residents' extreme secrecy, analysts grew more confident that
they had hit the jackpot.
"There wasn't perfect visibility on everything inside the compound, but we did have a very good
understanding of the residents who were there, in terms of the number there and in terms of who the
males were and the women and children," a senior U.S. intelligence official told reporters. "We were able
to identify a family at the compound that, in terms of numbers, squared with the number of bin Laden
family members we thought were probably living with him in Pakistan."
Obama was first informed of the breakthrough in August. By February the clues were solid enough for
Panetta to begin planning a raid. Panetta called the commander of the Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC), Vice Admiral William McRaven, to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. JSOC is the
potent weapon created from the humiliation of the failed 1980 hostage-rescue mission. That effort was
doomed by inadequate preparation, poor communication and cascading equipment failures. JSOC put
an end to those obstacles among the elite U.S. strike forces and has become one of the most effective
tools in the American military for dealing with unconventional enemies in the shape-shifting war on terror.
Ultimately, the plan devised by McRaven's troops called for about 80 men aboard four helicopters. "I
don't want you to plan for an option that doesn't allow you to fight your way out," Obama told his military
planners. Darkness was the cloak and speed essential; the force had to be in and out of Pakistan before
the Pakistani military could respond. They rehearsed against a 30-minute clock. The orders were capture
or kill.
Meanwhile, the pace of secret White House briefings accelerated in March and April, culminating in the
April 28 session at which Obama weighed the conflicting advice of his senior circle. When the decision
was made to strike the compound, bin Laden still had not been spotted among the residents behind the
walls.
The raiders found him near the end of their search through the house. The courier was already dead on
the first floor, along with his brother and a woman caught in the cross fire. When the SEALs encountered
bin Laden, he was with one of his wives. The young woman started toward the SEALs and was shot in
the leg. Bin Laden, unarmed, appeared ready to resist, according to a Defense Department account.
In an instant it was over: in all, four men and one woman lay dead. Bin Laden was shot in the head and in
the chest. One of bin Laden's wives confirmed his identity even as a photograph of the dead man's face
was relayed for examination by a face-recognition program. As the SEAL team prepared to load the body
onto a helicopter, at Langley McRaven delivered the verdict. His voice was relayed to the White House
Situation Room: "Geronimo: E-KIA," meaning enemy — killed in action.

9. "We got him," Obama said.
The strike force had eluded Pakistani radar on the flight into the country, but once the firefight erupted,
the air force scrambled jets, which might arrive with guns blazing. A decision was made to destroy the
stricken chopper. Surviving women and children in the compound — some of them wounded — were
moved to safety as the explosives were placed and detonated. In the meantime, SEALs emerged from
the house carrying computer drives and other potential intelligence treasures collected during a hasty
search.
Aloft, the raiders performed a head count to confirm that they hadn't lost a man. That news sent a second
wave of smiles through the Situation Room. "They said all the helicopters are up, none of our people are
hurt," a senior Administration official told TIME. "That was actually the period of most relief." DNA from
the body was matched to known relatives of bin Laden's — a third form of identification.
According to officials, the dead man's next stop was the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier in the
Arabian Sea. There, his body was washed and wrapped in a white sheet, then dropped overboard. There
would be no grave for his admirers to venerate. The face that haunted the Western world, the eyes that
looked on the blazing towers with pride of authorship, sank sightless beneath the waves.
What He Leaves Behind
On Sept. 17, 2001, the same day that President Bush promised "dead or alive," Secretary of State Colin
Powell — already a seasoned veteran of the hunt for bin Laden — had this to say: "We are after the
al-Qaeda network. It's not one individual; it's lots of individuals, and it's lots of cells. Osama bin Laden is
the chairman of the holding company, and within that holding company are terrorist cells and
organizations in dozens of countries around the world, any one them capable of committing a terrorist
act."
The hunt for bin Laden was only one aspect of the war that he unleashed. It has been a war unlike any
other, one that defies definition. It has persisted in Afghanistan long after bin Laden and his enabler
Mullah Omar were driven from the country. It bled into Iraq without Americans being able to agree
whether we had chased or created it there. It is a gray war, without borders or uniforms, fought on
frontiers ranging from the rocky highlands of the Silk Road to the aisles of the suburban beauty-supply
warehouse where an al-Qaeda trainee bought chemicals to make a bomb. You can't ignore the war,
because it can come and find you when you least expect it.
So while it's not enough to get one individual, the occasion of bin Laden's death is a moment to take
stock. A scattered enemy can still be a dangerous one. Terrorism experts warn of the possibility that an
isolated cell or lone wolf might try to strike in retaliation for the killing of the leader.
But the al-Qaeda network is a tattered tissue compared with what it was when it managed to hit the
American mainland as it had never been hit by outsiders before. According to polling by the Pew
Research Center's Global Attitudes Project, across the Muslim world confidence in bin Laden had
plunged long before his death — down by half in the Palestinian territories, by even more in Indonesia,
Jordan and, yes, Pakistan.

10. From Tunisia to Egypt to Syria this year, scores of thousands of young people — the very people bin
Laden hoped to lead backward across a millennium — have poured into the streets in peaceful uprisings,
chanting slogans of democracy. To be sure, Islamic fundamentalists will seek to turn the Arab Spring in
their own direction, but regardless of how that plays out, it has been a bad season for bin Ladenism.
The successes against al-Qaeda have cost us dearly — in money, time, easy freedom and untroubled
sleep. It has cost the lives of more than 5,000 U.S. and allied service members while leaving many more
thousands wounded. The war on terrorism is nearly 10 years old and has no clear end in sight.
But perhaps the most important thing to come from bin Laden's death is the sense that maybe this
struggle won't last forever. That hope seemed to animate the young people who greeted the news
Sunday night with jubilation. Outside the White House, college students turned Pennsylvania Avenue into
a giant party, waving flags and chanting "U.S.A.!" They shimmied trees, sang patriotic songs and hugged
strangers like sailors on V-J Day. Similar celebrations broke out across the country, but the next day a
more contemplative mood settled over people whose lives were marked by 9/11. People like Ben Hughes,
21, a junior at Savannah College of Art and Design, who typed this Facebook message on the first day
without Osama bin Laden:
"I was a sixth grade student in Chatham, MA. I distinctly remember walking into school that morning with
two friends, one of whom had his birthday that day and was planning a party. When the first plane hit, we
were all ushered to the main hallway and made to take seats on the floor for an announcement from our
principal. She told us that it seemed an accident had occurred with one of the World Trade Center
buildings in New York City. A pilot may have suffered a heart attack at the helm of the aircraft and hit the
building, she said.
"We continued our day without access to television or news outlets. But you could see that the teachers
knew more than they let on. When I arrived home I asked my mother if I could watch the news reports,
and for what seemed like days we sat there, in both awe and terror. It was the first moment in my short
life where I felt entirely helpless.
"In the years since that day I have marked every year with a solid time of reflection and silence. And I will
always remember also that I was on a flight between Charlotte, NC and Savannah, GA when the pilot
came over the loudspeaker to announce that Osama bin Laden had been killed."
The innocence lost can never be restored. But the feeling of helplessness need not last forever. It is an
older, wiser country that writes the epitaph of the terrorist.

11. Obama 1, Osama 0
By JOE KLEIN Friday, May 20, 2011
White House Situation Room, Sunday, May 1. The "minutes passed like days"
Pete Souza / White House
Sometimes the tabloid route is best: Obama got Osama. President Barack Hussein Obama approved the
attack that killed his near namesake Osama bin Laden the very same week that Obama revealed his
long-form birth certificate, addressing a silly dispute that was really about something heinous and serious:
the suspicion of far too many Americans that the President was not who he said he was, that he was a
secret Muslim and maybe not even playing for our team. All such doubts are resolved now, by document
and deed, although the various birthers and truthers and mouthers will continue to play their vile games.
But the facts are there for posterity and for the voters who will have to make a judgment in 2012: this
profoundly American President ran an exquisite operation to find and kill one of the great villains of
history. In the process, U.S. presidential politics and the so-called war on terror were transformed
dramatically; suddenly, both foreign policy experts and Republican candidates for President had vast
new landscapes to consider. And so much for No Drama, by the way.
there is no measure of competence the public takes more seriously than a President's performance as
Commander in Chief. On the most basic level, the bin Laden raid was a vivid demonstration of how this
Commander in Chief operates. He is discreet, precise, patient and willing to be lethal. He did not take the
easy route, which would have been a stealth-bomber strike on bin Laden's compound. He ordered the
Navy SEAL operation, even though there were myriad ways it could have failed — or turned out to be an
embarrassment if bin Laden hadn't been there, or a disaster if the SEALs had been slaughtered, or if a
helicopter had been damaged (as several aircraft were when Jimmy Carter tried to rescue the hostages
from Iran). In at least nine National Security Council meetings, Obama insisted on reviewing every crucial
detail of the operation. He made sure, after a decade of witless Islam-related goofs by U.S. leaders, that
bin Laden's body would be handled and consigned to the lower depths in a way that would not offend
Muslims; that in the early hours, at least, there wouldn't be gory photos or films or any evidence of
barbaric gloating; that the operation would be surgical and stealthy enough that bin Laden's document
hoard would be preserved and dispositive DNA evidence would be gathered. These are the sort of
nuances — a word his predecessor mocked — that have marked many of Obama's foreign policy

12. decisions, made in a deliberative style that his critics, and even some supporters, have seen as evidence
of dithering or indecision.
George W. Bush certainly deserves some of the credit for this raid. It would not have been possible
without his decision to amp up human-intelligence assets and special-operations forces after decades of
neglect. But you have to wonder whether Bush would have had the patience or subtlety to conduct this
operation with the same thoroughness Obama did. Bush certainly lacked the strategic focus to
understand that the war against al-Qaeda had to be primarily a slow-moving special-forces affair; he was
diverted into bold gestures, like the disastrous war in Iraq. He never studied the intelligence rigorously
enough; he bought the sources that backed his predispositions. He understood too late the style and
substance of Islam, how words like crusade resonated through the region. His was a bumper-sticker
foreign policy. His speeches were full of God and Freedom and Evildoers. His troops rushed into
Baghdad in three weeks, and he celebrated their victory with another bumper sticker: MISSION
ACCOMPLISHED. He was able to use these simplicities to win re-election in 2004, although he lost a lot
of lives unnecessarily and damaged America's esteem in the eyes of the world.
Obama's national-security practices, if not his actual policies, have been almost the exact opposite,
almost to a fault. There have been no three-week victories; there have been three-month deliberations
about what to do in Afghanistan. There were precious few victories at all before the bin Laden operation.
There was a lot of multilateralism and deference to foreign leaders. Critics said Obama bowed too deeply
to the Emperor of Japan. There were few dramatic pronouncements and zero foreign policy bumper
stickers; there were more than a few embarrassments. He was dissed by the Chinese. He was dissed by
the Iranians. He was defied by corrupt nonentities like Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai; he was double-dealt
by the Pakistanis. And in recent weeks, there was a growing chorus that his handling of the Arab Spring
revolutions had been incoherent and his indulgence in a humanitarian intervention in Libya had been
muscled through by a coterie of female policy advisers who were tougher than he was.
In the days before the bin Laden raid, Obama's national-security staff was increasingly frustrated with
how his foreign policy was being portrayed. He was not indecisive, they argued, just careful. They made
a transcript of a crucial Feb. 1 phone call between Obama and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak available to me. It
was classic Obama. "I have no interest in embarrassing you," the President said. "I want to help you
secure your legacy by ushering in a new era." He worked this track patiently, twice, three times. "I respect
my elders," Obama said, "but because things worked one way in the past, that doesn't mean they're
going to work the same way in the future. You need to seize this historic moment and leave a positive
legacy." Mubarak said he'd think about it and would talk again in a week. Obama said he wanted to talk
again the next day. Mubarak said maybe over the weekend; Obama said no: "We'll talk in 24 hours." No
threats, but no give, either.
"You have to see this in the context of history," a senior Administration official told me. "That's a pretty
tough decision to make, involving a longtime U.S. ally. But he was very firm with Mubarak. If you look at
Reagan, he agonized far longer over whether to abandon governments we had supported in Indonesia
and the Philippines than the President did about Egypt." Last Aug. 12, four months before the Tunisian
rebellion began, the President issued a national-security directive ordering his staff to develop a new
policy that assumed the governments in the Middle East were rickety and might soon topple. A copy of
this memo was provided to me as well.

13. Too much has been made of what some are calling Obama's taste for humanitarian intervention. Officials
at the National Security Council and the State Department insist that the roles of NSC staffer Samantha
Power, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and former State Department director of policy planning
Anne-Marie Slaughter have been exaggerated. Power is a well-known human-rights activist, but she
attended only one meeting with the President on Middle East policy in the past six months; Slaughter is a
prominent academic, but she never met with the President on these issues. Indeed, Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton was leaning against taking military action in Libya until the last moment, when members of
the Arab League convinced her that a massacre would take place in Benghazi if nothing were done. The
President opposed a no-fly zone because it wouldn't effectively stop a Gaddafi massacre. "He expanded
the U.N. resolution to include attacks on Libyan equipment and forces about to move into the city," an
Administration official said. "He drove the policy. No one talked him into anything."
But there was something incoherent, or perhaps insufficiently explained, about Obama's foreign policy
performance. The Libya intervention opened the door to a series of logical questions: Why choose this
humanitarian intervention and not others? Why not get involved in Syria, a far more crucial country,
where the government was brutally suppressing its citizens and perhaps even conducting massacres?
Whom were we actually supporting in Libya? What if the conflict slipped into a tribal stalemate? How
were we going to deal with the economic catastrophe looming in Egypt, which Administration officials say
is the most pressing problem in the region? Weren't the President's priorities all screwed up? "Libya was
tough," the official told me. "The President decided to make a front-end decision to save Benghazi and let
our allies carry the burden after that." This policy became the subject of ridicule after an anonymous
Administration official called it "leading from the rear."
The splendid success of the bin Laden operation should clarify the precise way that this President goes
about his work. It also provides an insight into the reasons for Obama's ill-concealed frustration with his
critics: the metabolism of policy runs much more slowly than the metabolism of the media. Policy,
especially foreign policy, does not lend itself to spiffy one-size-fits-all doctrines. The same President can
decide to take a risky shot at killing Osama bin Laden and choose not to take out Muammar Gaddafi; he
can decide to make a discreet humanitarian intervention in Benghazi, at the behest of all the countries in
the region, while allowing blood to flow in Syria. Not all of these decisions will prove correct over time —
every President makes mistakes — but the overall pattern of judgments can be assessed only with
sufficient hindsight. It is difficult for a President and his team to keep things in perspective when the
media pulse has reached tuning-fork speed and now includes not just CNN and Fox News but also
al-Jazeera, Facebook and Twitter. It is particularly difficult for a President whose every decision is
questioned by an opposition whose most prominent spokespeople are willing to toy with despicable
rumors about his nationality and religious background.
"My fellow Americans," the President opened at the White House correspondents' dinner on the night
before bin Laden was killed, and the audience roared with laughter. His decimation of Donald Trump,
who sat in the audience, was particularly brutal. He marveled at Trump's decision to "fire" Gary Busey
instead of Meat Loaf on his Celebrity Apprentice show. "These are the kinds of decisions that would keep
me up at night. Well handled, sir." The audience didn't know it at the time, but two nights earlier Obama
had been kept up trying to decide whether to launch the SEAL team against bin Laden or take the
stealth-bomber route. A President lives at the intersection of historic decisions like that one and a media
environment in which Donald Trump can make outlandish claims about the President's birthplace — and

14. shoot to the top of Republican presidential polls. The distance between those two worlds is
mind-bending.
The Obama presidency has been plagued by complexities: How do you conduct a presidency without
bumper stickers? How can you explain counterintuitive policies like the need to spend money to soften
the blow of a killer recession, even if it expands the federal deficit? How do you convey the policy
tightrope that has to be walked as longtime despotic allies in the Arab world are toppled, or not, by
revolutions without leaders? How can you explain the delicate task of managing relations with China,
when all the public wants to know is why the U.S. seems to be falling behind economically?
The one slogan Obama has attempted — WINNING THE FUTURE — seems pretty lame and lamer still
when he repeats it incessantly. Why isn't he focused on winning the present? There have been times —
his speech after the Tucson, Ariz., shootings, his bin Laden announcement — when the President has
tapped directly into the heart of American sensibility and sentiment. More often, he seems a stranger,
unable to fix on the momentary needs of the public, unwilling to indulge the instantaneous needs of the
media. His strategy is to hope that the accumulated wisdom of his decisionmaking will count for more
when 2012 rolls around than the pyrotechnics that pass for political discourse in this jittery, nano-wired
age. He will mediate congressional disputes rather than make grand policy proposals that others can
shoot down. He will eschew dramatic gestures overseas — unless he has carefully considered every
facet, as he did in Abbottabad, Pakistan. He will play the grownup because he is a grownup. It will be
interesting to see if that works.
The White House Situation Room Through the Years

15. War Room
President Lyndon B. Johnson, Walt Rostow and others look at relief map of the Khe Sanh area, Vietnam,
on February 15, 1968. LBJ's predecessor, President John F. Kennedy created the situation room as an
information center in May 1961 after he grew frustrated at the inability to work with real time information
during the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
Dark Matters
President Jimmy Carter participates in a National Security Council Special Coordination Committee
meeting on February 3, 1977.

16. On the Map
President Ronald Reagan meets in the sit room with Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General
Robert T. Herres (top left) and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger to discuss the condition of the US
missile frigate Stark on May 1, 1987.
Panels
President Bill Clinton holds a video tele-conference with former South African President Nelson Mandela

17. in the situation room on February 22, 2000. Clinton offered continuing US support to Burundi peace talks
in a message to participants of Arusha discussions chaired by Mandela.
Secure Location
President George W. Bush speaks with Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki via secure videoconference
from the Situation Room at the White House January 4, 2007.
Person to Person

18. A secure, soundproof telephone cabin, known as a "Superman tube" is seen in the White House
Situation Room complex in the basement of the West Wing of the White House, May 18, 2007. The
complex went through a major renovation in 2007 — both the size of the suite was enhanced as well as
the technological capabilities.
Multiple Screens
The President and senior staff use the room, seen here May 18, 2007, for regular meetings with of the
National Security Council and to talk via secure videoconference with foreign leaders. In times of
emergency, the Situation Room becomes a crisis-management center.

19. Commander-in-Chief
President Barack Obama talks with members of the national security team at the conclusion of one in a
series of meetings discussing the mission against Osama bin Laden, in the Situation Room of the White
House, May 1, 2011.
Photo Essay
Crowds, Chaos and Some Closure at Ground
Zero
Monday, May 2, 2011 | By TIME Photo Department
There was perhaps no place more fitting to go than the place where it all began. As President Obama wrapped up his
remarks, confirming the death of Public Enemy No. 1, Osama bin Laden, a few people started to gather at New York
City’s Ground Zero. They kept coming. By the time a man shinnied up a lamppost around midnight and sprayed
bottles of champagne over the crowd, several hundred people had gathered.
The word for the night was “closure”. It sprung from the lips of almost every person who went to the hallowed ground
of the World Trade Center to mark an end of sorts to the U.S.’s most painful open wound. While capturing bin Laden
likely won’t change much of the operations of al-Qaeda, tonight, that didn’t matter. What mattered was the people
who gathered to celebrate the conquering of the person who killed many of this city’s loved ones.
As everyone knows, in America, when the words are slow to come, the booze pours freely. This colorful crowd,
American flags draped around their necks, sang the national anthem, “God Bless the U.S.A.” and “America, the

20. Beautiful” in spurts of unison. They chanted “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!,” “Yes, we can!” (the slogan of Obama’s 2008
presidential campaign) and “Hey, hey, hey, goodbye.” “This is New York — this what we do,” said Sonam Velani, a
23-year-old who lives just a few blocks from the site of the 9/11 WTC attack. “We come together to celebrate these
things — even at two in the morning.”
One man, wearing what can only be described as stunner shades, clad in an American flag hat and T-shirt, broadcast
“Born in the U.S.A.” on a makeshift boom box he held high above his head. Another man scrambled up a pole to
address the crowd. “I have something to say. You see what the enemy can do,” he said, gesturing at the empty hole
where the Twin Towers once stood. “We will go further.”
Lauren Fleishman for TIME
A crowd gathered at New York's Ground Zero right after Obama's speech announcing the death of Osama Bin Laden
on May 1, 2011. Revelers in the crowd scrambled up light poles over the cheering crowd.
As the hours ticked by, the usual antics were to be expected. There were the sellers hawking American flags for $5 a
pop, the trampled cardboard cases of Keystone Light (evidence of the drunken college kids who stumbled around
looking for more) and the few who took things a little too far, climbing things not meant to be climbed. But in looking
for the quieter ones, the people standing solemnly at the back of the crowd, it was easy to spot those who had
journeyed to Ground Zero not for a boisterous celebration but to reflect on the magnitude of the night.
Among them was Mickey Carroll, a 29-year-old firefighter from Staten Island who lost his father, also a firefighter, on
9/11. He couldn’t quite sum up the emotions he felt. “It’s hard to explain. I feel anxious. I feel excited,” he said. “This
is something that this country [EM] these families, my family [EM] has been waiting for for so long.”
Jamie Roman, a 17-year-old from Astoria, Queens, who came to Ground Zero with her mother, echoed that sentiment.
Holding a T-shirt tightly to her chest, she fought tears as she remembered the man it memorialized. She spoke of

21. Christopher Santora, a close family friend who, at 23, was the youngest firefighter to lose his life in the attacks. “This
is a little bit of closure,” she said. “We finally have some peace in our lives.”
By Kayla Webley, with reporting by Paul Moakley
Emotions ran high among those gathering from solemn to excited. A young student Kathleen Lampert sings along to
God Bless America with the crowd.

22. Young servicemen of the U.S. Army drove into the city from Yonkers, New York to join the gathering.
Much of the crowd was made up of young college students who came with all kinds of flags.
The crowd held handmade signs to celebrate including this impromptu one on an iPad.

23. There were sellers hawking American flags for $5 a pop like Lance (who would only give his first
name) early on in the gathering.
Some young visitors purchased them from the competing vendors to celebrate with the crowd.

24. Those driving by Ground Zero blew their horns to the delight of the crowds.
20-year-old Chris Lombari, the son of a firefighter from Staten Island, climbed on top of a phone
booth to cheer on the crowd and reflect on the night.

25. It was an emotional night for many of those who attended the impromptu gathering and a time to
be close with friends.
The crowd made lots of noise with patriotic chants, boom boxes and all kinds of horns.

26. From left: Andrea Osbourne and Jessica Davis from F.I.T. celebrated with some patriotic makeup.
An excited young man raised the spirits of the crowd while waving a tattered flag over the streets.

27. A young man gets a lift from his friend to wave a flag over the crowd.
The word for the night was "closure". It sprung from almost every persons' lips who came to the
hallowed ground of the World Trade Center to mark an end of sorts to our nation's most painful
open wound. Many where young patriotic men waving or wrapping themselves in the stars and
stripes.

28. Amid the cheers it was easy to spot those who had come to Ground Zero not for the boisterous
celebration, but to reflect on the magnitude of the night.
Michael Carroll, 27 years old from Ladder 120 in Brownsville, Brooklyn who lost his father, also
a firefighter, on 9/11. He couldn't quite sum up the emotions he felt. "It's hard to explain. I feel
anxious. I feel excited," he said. "This is something that this country, these families, my family,
has been waiting for for so long."

29. The crowd grew to several hundred people by 1:00am cheering slogans like "USA! USA! USA!"
and "Yes, We Can!" (the slogan of Obama's 2008 campaign).
A Long Time Going
By PETER BERGEN Friday, May 20, 2011
Bin Laden enjoys a laugh in the Jalalabad region of Afghanistan in 1988
AFP/Getty Images
Osama bin Laden long fancied himself something of a poet. His compositions tended to the morbid, and
a poem written two years after 9/11 in which he contemplated the circumstances of his death was no

30. exception. Bin Laden wrote, "Let my grave be an eagle's belly, its resting place in the sky's atmosphere
amongst perched eagles."
As it turns out, bin Laden's grave is somewhere at the bottom of the Arabian Sea, to which his body was
consigned after his death in Pakistan at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs. If there is poetry in bin Laden's
end, it is the poetry of justice, and it calls to mind what President George W. Bush had predicted would
happen in a speech he gave to Congress just nine days after 9/11. In an uncharacteristic burst of
eloquence, Bush asserted that bin Laden and al-Qaeda would eventually be consigned to "history's
unmarked grave of discarded lies," just as communism and Nazism had been before them.
Though bin Laden's body may have been buried at sea on May 2, the burial of bin Ladenism has been a
decade in the making. Indeed, it began on the very day of bin Laden's greatest triumph. At first glance,
the 9/11 assault looked like a stunning win for al-Qaeda, a ragtag band of jihadists who had bloodied the
nose of the world's only superpower. But on closer look it became something far less significant, because
the attacks on Washington and New York City did not achieve bin Laden's key strategic goal: the
withdrawal of the U.S. from the Middle East, which he imagined would lead to the collapse of all the
American-backed authoritarian regimes in the region.
Instead, the opposite happened: the U.S. invaded and occupied first Afghanistan and then Iraq. By
attacking the American mainland and inviting reprisal, al-Qaeda — which means "the base" in Arabic —
lost the best base it had ever had: Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. In this sense, 9/11 was similar to another
surprise attack, that on Pearl Harbor on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, a stunning tactical victory that set in
motion events that would end in the defeat of imperial Japan.
Shrewder members of bin Laden's inner circle had warned him before 9/11 that antagonizing the U.S.
would be counterproductive, and internal al-Qaeda memos written after the fall of the Taliban and later
recovered by the U.S. military show that some of bin Laden's followers fully understood the folly of the
attacks. In 2002 an al-Qaeda insider wrote to another, saying, "Regrettably, my brother ... during just six
months, we lost what we built in years."
The responsibility for that act of hubris lies squarely with bin Laden: despite his reputation for shyness
and diffidence, he ran al-Qaeda as a dictatorship. His son Omar recalls that the men who worked for his
father had a habit of requesting permission before they spoke with their leader, saying, "Dear prince, may
I speak?" Joining al-Qaeda meant taking a personal religious oath of allegiance to bin Laden, just as
joining the Nazi Party had required swearing personal fealty to the Führer. So bin Laden's group became
just as much a hostage to its leader's flawed strategic vision as the Nazis were to Hitler's.
The key to understanding this vision and all of bin Laden's actions was his utter conviction that he was an
instrument of God's will. In short, he was a religious zealot. That zealotry first revealed itself when he was
a teenager. Khaled Batarfi, a soccer-playing buddy of bin Laden's on the streets of Jidda, Saudi Arabia,
where they both grew up, remembers his solemn friend praying seven times a day (two more than
mandated by Islamic convention) and fasting twice a week in imitation of the Prophet Muhammad. For
entertainment, bin Laden would assemble a group of friends at his house to chant songs about the
liberation of Palestine.

31. Bin Laden's religious zeal was colored by the fact that his family had made its vast fortune as the
principal contractor renovating the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, which gave him a direct connection to
Islam's holiest places. In his early 20s, bin Laden worked in the family business; he was a priggish young
man who was also studying economics at a university.
His destiny would change with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979. The Afghan war prompted
the billionaire's son to launch an ambitious plan to confront the Soviets with a small group of Arabs under
his command. That group eventually provided the nucleus of al-Qaeda, which bin Laden founded in 1988
as the war against the Soviets began to wind down. The purpose of al-Qaeda was to take jihad to other
parts of the globe and eventually to the U.S., the nation he believed was leading a Western conspiracy to
destroy true Islam. In the 1990s bin Laden would often describe America as "the head of the snake."
Jamal Khalifa, his best friend at the university in Jidda and later also his brother-in-law, told me bin Laden
was driven not only by a desire to implement what he saw as God's will but also by a fear of divine
punishment if he failed to do so. So not defending Islam from what he came to believe was its most
important enemy would be disobeying God, something he would never do.
In 1997, when I was a producer for CNN, I met with bin Laden in eastern Afghanistan to film his first
television interview. He struck me as intelligent and well informed, someone who comported himself
more like a cleric than like the revolutionary he was quickly becoming. His followers treated bin Laden
with great deference, referring to him as "the sheik," and hung on his every pronouncement.
During the course of that interview, bin Laden laid out his rationale for his plan to attack the U.S., whose
support for Israel and the regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt made it, in his mind, the enemy of Islam. Bin
Laden also explained that the U.S. was as weak as the Soviet Union had been, and he cited the
American withdrawal from Vietnam in the 1970s as evidence for this view. He poured scorn on the notion
that the U.S. thought of itself as a superpower "even after all these successive defeats."
That would turn out to be a dangerous delusion, which would culminate in bin Laden's death at the hands
of the same U.S. soldiers he had long disparaged as weaklings. Now that he is gone, there will inevitably
be some jockeying to succeed him. A U.S. counterterrorism official told me that there was "no succession
plan in place" to replace bin Laden. While the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri had long been his deputy, he
is not the natural, charismatic leader that bin Laden was. U.S. officials believe that al-Zawahiri is not
popular with his colleagues, and they hope there will be disharmony and discord as the militants sort out
the succession.
As they do so, the jihadists will be mindful that their world has passed them by. The al-Qaeda leadership,
its foot soldiers and its ideology played no role in the series of protests and revolts that have rolled across
the Middle East and North Africa, from Tunisia to Egypt and then on to Bahrain, Yemen and Libya. Bin
Laden must have watched these events unfold with a mixture of excitement and deep worry.
Overthrowing the dictatorships and monarchies of the Middle East was long his central goal, but the Arab
revolutions were not the kind he had envisioned. Protesters in the streets of Tunis and Cairo didn't carry
placards with pictures of bin Laden's face, and the Facebook revolutionaries who launched the uprisings
represent everything al-Qaeda hates: they are secular, liberal and antiauthoritarian, and their ranks
include women. The eventual outcome of these revolts will not be to al-Qaeda's satisfaction either,

32. because almost no one in the streets of Egypt, Libya or Yemen is clamoring for the imposition of a
Taliban-style theocracy, al-Qaeda's preferred end for the states in the region.
Between the Arab Spring and the death of bin Laden, it is hard to imagine greater blows to al-Qaeda's
ideology and organization. President Obama has characterized al-Qaeda and its affiliates as "small men
on the wrong side of history." For al-Qaeda, that history just sped up, as bin Laden's body floated down
into the ocean deeps and its proper place in the unmarked grave of discarded lies.
Bergen is the director of the national-security-studies program at the New America Foundation. His latest
book is The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and al-Qaeda
A Life of Extremes

34. When Terror Loses its Grip
By FAREED ZAKARIA Friday, May 20, 2011
Bin Laden's sudden, unexpected death unleashed a decade's worth of pent-up anxiety — and relief
James Nachtwey for TIME
It is a bizarre historical coincidence. President Barack Obama announced to the world that Osama bin
Laden was dead on May 1, the very same day that, 66 years earlier, the German government announced
that Adolf Hitler was dead. It's fitting that two of history's great mass murderers share a day of death.
(Sort of. Hitler actually killed himself a day earlier, but his death was not revealed to the world until the
following day.) Both embodied charisma and intelligence deployed in the service of evil — and both were
utterly callous about the killing of innocents to further their causes.
There are, of course, many differences between Hitler and bin Laden. But one great similarity holds.
Hitler's death marked the end of the Nazi challenge from Germany. And bin Laden's death will mark the
end of the global threat of al-Qaeda.
Let me be clear. Of course, there are still groups that call themselves al-Qaeda in Pakistan, Yemen,
North Africa, Somalia and elsewhere. They will still plot and execute terrorist attacks. We will still have to
be vigilant and go after them. But the danger from al-Qaeda was always much more than that of a few
isolated terrorist attacks. It was an ideological message that we feared had an appeal across the Muslim
world of 1.5 billion believers. The organization had created a message of opposition and defiance that
was resonating in that world during the 1990s and right after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
A few weeks after 9/11, I wrote an essay titled "Why They Hate Us," exploring the roots of this Muslim
rage. I argued that while U.S. foreign policy might be a contributing factor to the unhappiness of Arabs, it
could not alone explain the scale, depth and intensity of Islamic terrorism. After all, U.S. foreign policy
over the years has victimized many countries in Latin America and killed millions of Vietnamese, and yet
you did not see terrorism emanating from those quarters. There was something different about the nature
of Arab frustration that had morphed into anti-American terrorism.
The central problem, I argued, was that the stagnation and repression of the Arab world — 40 years of
tyranny and decay — had led to deep despair and finally to extreme opposition movements. The one

35. aspect of Arab society that dictators could not ban was religion. So the mosque became the gathering
ground of opposition movements, and Islam — the one language that could not be censored — became
the voice of opposition. The U.S. became a target because we supported the Arab autocracies.
Al-Qaeda is a Saudi-Egyptian alliance — bin Laden was Saudi; Ayman al-Zawahiri, his deputy, is
Egyptian — that was formed to topple the Saudi and Egyptian regimes and others like them. And that is
why bin Laden's death comes at a particularly bad moment for the movement he launched. Its founding
rationale has been shattered by the Arab Spring of this year. Al-Qaeda believed that the only way to
topple the dictatorships of the Arab world was through violence, that participation in secular political
processes was heretical and that people wanted and would cheer an Islamic regime. Over the past few
months, millions in the Arab world have toppled regimes relatively peacefully, and what they have sought
was not a caliphate, not a theocracy, but a modern democracy. The crowds in Cairo's Tahrir Square did
not have pictures of bin Laden or al-Zawahiri in their hands as they chanted for President Hosni
Mubarak's ouster.
Polls around the Muslim world confirm that support for bin Laden has been plummeting over the past five
years. As al-Qaeda morphed into a series of small, local groups, the only places it could mount attacks
were cafés and subway stations — in other words, against locals. That turned the locals against
al-Qaeda. Their "support" for radical jihadism had in any event always been more theoretical than real, a
support for a romantic notion of militant opposition to the West and its domination of the modern world.
And it was premised on the assumption that any violence would be directed against "them" (the West),
not "us" (Muslims). Once the terrorism came home, even people in Saudi Arabia realized that they didn't
want to return to the 7th century, and they didn't much like the men who wanted to bomb them back
there.
Al-Qaeda is not like Hitler's Germany, which was a vast, rich country with a massive army. It never had
many resources or people. Al-Qaeda is an idea, an ideology. And it was personified by bin Laden, a man
who for his followers represented courage and conviction. Coming from a wealthy family, he had
forsaken a life of luxury to fight the Soviet Union in the mountains of Afghanistan and then trained his
guns on the U.S. He used literary Arabic, spoke movingly and tried to seduce millions of Muslims. Those
who were duly seduced and joined the group swore a personal oath to him. Young men who volunteered
for suicide missions were not dying for al-Zawahiri or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who planned the 9/11
attacks. They were dying for bin Laden. And with bin Laden's death, the cause and the man have both
been extinguished. We will battle terrorists for many years to come, but that does not make them a mortal
threat to the Western world or its way of life. The existential danger is over.
The nature of the operation against bin Laden spotlights a path for the future of the war on terrorism.
Presidents George W. Bush and Obama can share the credit for bin Laden's death, as should many in
the U.S. government and military. But it is fair to say that Obama made a decision to dramatically expand
the counterterrorism aspect of this struggle. He increased the number of special operations in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, quadrupled the number of drone attacks on al-Qaeda's senior leadership in
Pakistan and devoted new resources and attention to intelligence gathering. (That is one reason why
General David Petraeus is leaving his powerful position directing the war in Afghanistan to run the CIA.)
This renewed focus paid off in many captures and kills before May 1, and it has finally paid off in the Big
One.

36. While Bush certainly used counterterrorism to fight al-Qaeda, the signature element of his strategy was
nation building. He believed that deposing one of the worst Arab dictators, Saddam Hussein, and
delivering democracy to Iraq would shatter al-Qaeda's appeal. The theory was correct, as the Arab
Spring has demonstrated: people in the Arab world want democracy, not dictatorship and not theocracy.
But in practice it is a very hard task for an outside power to deliver democracy — which first requires
political order and stability — to another nation. It is also a task for which militaries are not best suited.
The U.S. armed forces have done their best in Iraq and Afghanistan but — despite huge costs in blood
and treasure — the results in both nations are mixed at best.
Counterterrorism, by contrast, is a task well suited for military power. It requires good intelligence, above
all, and then the swiftness, skill and deadly firepower at which U.S. forces excel. The results speak for
themselves. The U.S. has inflicted significant and substantial losses on al-Qaeda by decapitating its
leadership and keeping the organization on the run, in hiding and in constant fear. It has been a more
effective strategy and vastly less costly than trying to clear, hold and build huge parts of Afghanistan in
the hope that order, stability, good governance and democracy will eventually flourish there.
Along the way, the efforts at nation building have tarnished the image of the American military. The
world's greatest fighting force was shown to be unable to deliver stability to Iraq and Afghanistan, had to
deal with scandals like the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and saw its soldiers losing
their once high morale. May 1 changed all that. The image of a smart, wise and supremely competent
U.S. has flashed across the globe. The lesson should be clear. An America that uses its military power
less promiscuously, more intelligently and in a targeted and focused manner might once again gain the
world's respect and fear, if not affection. And an America that can provide a compelling picture of a
modern, open society will be a far more attractive model for Arabs than Osama bin Laden's vision of a
backward medieval caliphate.
A Revival In Langley
By MASSIMO CALABRESI Friday, May 20, 2011

37. Leon Panetta
Michele Asselin / Contour / Getty Images for TIME
The spooks weren't even close to being certain that Osama bin Laden was holed up in the 1-acre (0.4
hectare) compound outside Abbottabad, Pakistan, on April 28. CIA Director Leon Panetta explained to
President Obama that afternoon that the agency had no hard proof he was there, no pictures or
voice-recognition data of his presence, nothing that could guarantee that the world's most-wanted man
was sheltering inside. If you had to lay odds on bin Laden's being inside, CIA officers said soberly, it
could be as low as 50-50. This was not, by any measure, a slam dunk.
But the window for action was closing, Panetta worried. In an interview with TIME, the CIA director (and
soon to be the next Secretary of Defense) explained that more than 100 people had already been briefed
on the mission, a fact that by itself was making an operation riskier by the day. Panetta was also fearful
that bin Laden might move again and the U.S.'s decadelong hunt to bring him to justice would start all
over. Besides, Panetta explained, the CIA was confident enough that bin Laden was inside that he felt
the President's national-security team was looking at "an obligation and a responsibility on all of us to
act."
The next day, Obama delivered written authorization for Panetta to run the operation that would kill bin
Laden using a Navy Seal team.
That marked quite a change. A few years ago, it would have been hard — maybe impossible — to find a
politician in Washington willing to bet on a CIA weather forecast, let alone a life-and-death mission of
national importance. The CIA, according to a 2005 CIA inspector general's report, had "suffered a
systemic failure" in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks when it failed to work with other U.S. agencies to thwart
the plot. The agency had been part of the team that lost bin Laden at Tora Bora in December 2001, the
last time anyone had a clear idea of where he was. Under pressure from Bush Administration officials to
justify a war with Iraq, the top spooks helped convince the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of
mass destruction when it turned out he had none. Few complained when Congress started carving the
agency into pieces in late 2004.
So with the spectacular coup in Abbottabad, it's fair to ask, Has the CIA turned itself around? Can the
secret agency in suburban Virginia once more protect the country, while telling the truth about the threats
it faces? In his first interview since running the operation that killed bin Laden, Panetta argued that his
agency has earned the nation's trust again. "This place really does have a fundamental commitment to
protecting the country," he said. "If you provide the right leadership and the right values, they're going to
do one hell of a job."
The Upside of Downsizing
Not for the first time, the CIA has marched a long road back to self-respect. When Panetta, a former
Congressman, Cabinet member and White House chief of staff, arrived at the agency in February 2009,
the place resembled nothing so much as a whipped dog. It had been the favorite punching bag during the
Bush years, blamed for its errors as well as the misjudgments of the political leaders to whom it answered.

38. Panetta's predecessor, General Michael Hayden, had tried to rebuild the agency's reputation on Capitol
Hill, rolling back interrogation and detention programs that had brought accusations of torture and illegal
activity, focusing instead on producing reliable, actionable intelligence. But "the relationship with
Congress had gone to hell," Panetta says, and the agency was gun-shy. "Every time they went up on the
Hill, they got the hell kicked out of them, and they became very defensive."
It helped that the CIA was much diminished. Acting on the recommendation of the 9/11 commission,
Congress stripped the CIA of much of its power over sister agencies like the National Security Agency
and the 11 other members of the U.S. "intelligence community" in 2004. Whereas once the CIA chief
determined the budgets of the other agencies and safeguarded CIA supremacy in intelligence operations
abroad and intelligence analysis at home, by 2006 it was merely one agency among many competing for
the attention of policymakers. The CIA fought the restructuring and lost.
But current and past senior CIA officials say the downsizing has turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Instead of wasting time worrying about the budget for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, CIA
leaders were able to concentrate on their core mission of collecting and analyzing intelligence for
policymakers. "Removing the managerial stuff has made them leaner and more muscular," says former
acting director John McLaughlin. It "has freed the agency to focus intensely on a lot of other things."
And, apparently, double-check its work. Panetta says the bin Laden mission is a good example of that.
On April 26, he held a final briefing on the Abbottabad compound in his office that included 15 team
leaders from the CIA CounterTerrorism Center, some from the special-activities division (which runs
covert operations) and some from the office of South Asian analysis.
Panetta wanted to get their final opinion of the coming mission. Support was not unanimous, and there
were ghosts in the room: some of the officers had been involved in the Carter Administration effort to go
after the hostages held by the Iranians; others had been involved in the ill-fated raid against Somali
warlords in 1993. Some officials, Panetta says, worried, "What if you go down and you're in a firefight and
the Pakistanis show up and start firing? How do you fight your way out?" But he says the agency had
second- and third-guessed the problem, arranging for backups and double-backups in the event of
snafus. "We'd red-teamed that issue to death," he says.
The biggest change at Langley may be Panetta himself. The boss pushed the spooks much harder than
some of their previous leaders had to share information with lawmakers on Capitol Hill in order to build
trust — and free up cash for vital missions in return. But Panetta also surprised agency veterans by
pushing back when Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. launched an investigation into the destruction by the
CIA's top clandestine official, Jose Rodriguez, of videotapes containing interrogations of al-Qaeda
leaders. That earned Panetta high marks inside the building, observers say. Though he lost the battle, he
helped limit the scope of Holder's investigation.
He also fought a fierce battle over turf with Dennis Blair, the former director of National Intelligence, who
wanted to decide who would be in charge of gathering intelligence at foreign posts.
Panetta contested the release of the legal memos that justified "enhanced interrogation techniques" like
waterboarding. President Obama, Holder and Panetta say waterboarding constitutes torture; Rodriguez

39. tells TIME that enhanced interrogation techniques provided "the lead information that eventually led to
the location of [bin Laden's] compound." Rodriguez says Panetta "has done a fantastic job."
Panetta insists his approach is just common sense. "I said, Look, the key here is to tell the Congress
what's going on and to be very up-front about what we're doing, because in the end, if you do that, they
may not always like what you're doing, but at least they know that you're being honest with them."
Panetta moves to the Pentagon on July 1 and will be replaced at the CIA by General David Petraeus,
who has spent the past decade, on and off, fighting overt and covert wars in South Asia. He watched the
mission in Abbottabad from his seventh-floor conference room at CIA headquarters, which had been
repurposed into an operations center. The hardest part was waiting to hear that bin Laden was there.
When special-ops chief William McRaven finally said they had "Geronimo," using the code word to
confirm that bin Laden was in the compound, there was an audible sigh of relief. But it was only when the
helicopter took off from the compound with the Seal team and bin Laden's body on board that Panetta's
office broke into applause.
The director then went to the White House at 6:30 to oversee and report on the formal identification of bin
Laden's body and wrapped up meetings an hour after the President made his announcement of bin
Laden's death to the country. As he left the White House, he could hear the crowds in Lafayette Square
cheering and waving flags. One chant, he says, was "CIA! CIA!"
"We've really turned a corner," the spymaster said to himself.
How Can We Trust Them?
By ARYN BAKER Friday, May 20, 2011
Pakistanis gather for prayer at the Data Darbar Sufi shrine in Lahore
Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images for TIME

40. The resort town of Abbottabad is a familiar one to day-tripping Pakistanis seeking escape from the urban
tumult of the Punjab plain. Just 75 miles (120 km) from the capital, Islamabad, colonial-era bungalows
abut modern whitewashed villas on small streets largely devoid of traffic. It's the kind of place where
families take a stroll as the day cools into night, where you might still go and ask a neighbor for a cup of
sugar. So when residents learned that Osama bin Laden had been living there, possibly for several years,
they were shocked.
Much less understandable is the claim, being made by defensive officials in Islamabad, that no one else
in Pakistan was aware that bin Laden was in Abbottabad.
That the world's best-known terrorist could be hiding in plain sight may be plausible in a country where
privacy is a sacred right. But in Pakistan, household secrets rarely stay that way. Housekeepers and
servants gossip at the back doors, and drivers chuckle over the infidelities of their employers. Anything
that raises more than an eyebrow is quickly brought to the attention of "the agencies" — local parlance
for Pakistan's ubiquitous intelligence groups, which closely monitor the daily lives of citizens, as much in
an effort to collect information as to enforce a paranoia-driven code of good behavior.
As any foreigner living in Pakistan knows, "the agencies" are especially adept at ferreting out the
presence of strangers. The crackle and click of telephone lines is a constant reminder that no
conversation is private, the crew-cut men in beige who materialize at inopportune moments proof that
one is never quite alone in Pakistan. So it beggars belief that absolutely no one knew who was living in a
compound that was, according to a U.S. official, "custom-built to hide someone of significance." John
Brennan, President Obama's adviser on counterterrorism, didn't arch his eyebrows when he declined at a
May 2 press conference to "speculate about who [within the Pakistani leadership] had foreknowledge
about bin Laden being in Abbottabad." But his skepticism was palpable. The location of bin Laden's last
address "there, outside of the capital, raises questions," Brennan said.
Those questions are at the heart of the renewed debate about one of the U.S.'s oldest partners in the
battle against terrorism. It can be summed up quite simply: Can Pakistan be trusted? If not, what can the
Obama Administration, so keen to extricate U.S. troops from the region, do about it? And just how safe is
Pakistan now that bin Laden is gone? The answers are not reassuring.
Bin Laden was not the cause of Pakistan's problems. But his presence in Abbottabad was a symptom of
a deeply ambivalent official approach to militancy that threatens to undermine the stability of this
nuclear-armed state. Elements in the Pakistani military have long viewed militants and extremists as
useful proxies. A blinkered focus on a perceived threat from the old enemy, India — with which Pakistan
has fought three wars over the disputed territory of Kashmir — has led to massive military spending,
depriving generations of Pakistanis of good education, adequate health care and the basic building
blocks of an economy — electricity, irrigation, roads. Then there's the sheer corruption and
incompetence of most Pakistani institutions: the leadership, both civilian and military, has pursued power
at the expense of building a functional political apparatus that promotes accountability over cronyism and
punishes inefficiency.
Even as Pakistan attempts to function, it is racked by insurgencies — one in the western province of
Baluchistan, where residents are demanding a share of the oil and gas wealth coming from their lands,

41. and another in the northeast, where the Pakistani Taliban are forcing their particular brand of radical
Islam on a population long neglected by the state. A weakening relationship with the U.S., a source of
support and financial aid, could cause Pakistan to lash out in unpredictable ways. Now, more than ever,
Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world.
Since the early days following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistan's leaders have tried to balance
their interests between continued support for militant organizations deployed in a proxy fight against India
and a desire to benefit from a lucrative relationship with the West. This allowed Pakistan to help capture
several top-ranking al-Qaeda members, even while it turned a blind eye when homegrown militants
crossed into Afghanistan to fight coalition troops there. The schizophrenia spread to the populace: in a
poll conducted early this year, Pakistanis overwhelmingly supported bin Laden but ranked the threat of
terrorist attacks as one of their greatest fears. Their leaders have failed to guide them out of the '90s-era
embrace of jihad as foreign policy into a modern era in which education, innovation and human resources
are a nation's most competitive weapons. Equally at fault is U.S. willingness to support the Pakistani
military, which promises quick solutions to regional problems (even if it does not always deliver) over the
slower process of investing in the institutions of civil society. Now Pakistan is on the verge of collapse,
held up only by a thin shell of military might with loyalties only to itself.
Long before Mohamed Atta started learning to pilot airplanes in a Florida flight school, Pakistan was
fostering its own breed of jihadis ready to wage war on India. The school curriculum was based on
contempt for infidels and glorification of martyrdom, the better to prepare a generation of guerrillas far
more effective than any conventional army. It would be a mistake to think bin Laden's death would be a
deterrent to anyone considering the path of militant jihad. If anything, it may inspire more young men,
devoid of alternatives, to seek glory in taking an American bullet.
It is true that school textbooks have lately been modified (though they still portray India as an enemy). But
the jihadist rhetoric resonates at weekly prayers in mosques where radical mullahs spew hate and
intolerance, unchecked by government authority. When a provincial governor was killed in January by a
bodyguard who saw him as a blasphemer for suggesting that the country's harsh blasphemy laws be
changed, thousands went into the streets to praise the murderer. Few government officials went on
record to condemn the assassin. The official silence smothered a small but growing civil-society
movement promoting tolerance and education. Two months later, the Minority Affairs Minister, a
Christian, was shot dead for the same reason. His assailants remain at large.
Nor do the extremists limit their violence to Pakistan. The roster of recent international terrorist attacks,
from London in 2005 to Mumbai in 2008 to the 2009 attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul and the foiled
2010 attack on New York City's Times Square, have one element in common: Pakistan. The attackers
either were Pakistani, were trained in Pakistan or were assisted by Pakistani handlers. It's a record that
makes a mockery of Pakistani government assertions that it is doing everything it can to stop terrorism.
Pakistani terrorist groups have not yet produced a leader of bin Laden's stature, but then, in a sense,
they don't need to. The skills they impart, from bombmaking to the wherewithal for multipronged attacks,
are far more valuable in a world where al-Qaeda franchises are focused less on expensive spectaculars
like 9/11 and more on smaller operations that sow fear and chaos. The perfect template is the 2008

42. attack on the Indian financial capital of Mumbai, in which four teams of Pakistani terrorists armed with
guns and grenades took the city hostage for 36 hours, killing 174.
That operation is thought to have been carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a terrorist group with long
and deep ties to Pakistani officialdom. At a trial in Chicago later this month, David Headley, a Pakistani
American accused of scoping out Mumbai targets for LeT, is expected to implicate Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, confirming long-held suspicions by American and Indian authorities,
as well as many Pakistanis, that the intelligence agency is dabbling in terrorism as much as spycraft.
Another Mumbai-style attack on Indian soil carries a very real possibility of war between India and
Pakistan, both of which have nuclear arms.
Pakistani officials never tire of pointing out that they have rolled up more al-Qaeda members than any
other nation, a claim that, while true, says much about the concentration of terrorists in the country. Such
captures have become diplomatic theater, produced with a flourish when Islamabad's relationship with
Washington is under particular strain. "Pakistan can be described as both the fireman and the arsonist,"
says Christine Fair, an expert at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Policy. "It constantly finds
ways of renewing its strategic relevance."
That is the crux of the matter. Pakistan has convinced the world that its geographical location and heft
are such that its interests need attending to, no matter how often it lets others — and itself — down.
Obama cannot be the first President to have wished that fate would rid him of the duty of working with,
and worrying about, so inconstant a partner. But as his predecessors have all discovered, fate won't.
Osama bin Laden's Pakistan Hideaway
Abbottabad, Pakistan, May 2, 2011
This is the house where Osama bin Laden was killed in a ground operation by U.S. special forces.

43. On Fire
A still image taken from video shows the compound in flames during the attack; this image was released
on May 2, 2011.
An Interior Bedroom
A video frame grab obtained from ABC News shows the inside of the house in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on

44. May 2, 2011.
Aftermath
A video frame grab from inside the house, released May 2, 2011.
Deadly Scene
The floor of one of the rooms in the compound is seen in an image released on May 2, 2011.

45. Burnt
Helicopter wreckage lies strewn across a charred portion of the compound lawn on May 2, 2011.
Rotor
Part of the wreckage of the helicopter lies on the compound lawn, May 2 2011.

46. Down
Another view of the helicopter.
The Grounds
A grab from a video made May 2, 2011 shows part of the compound yard.

47. Aerial
The U.S. Department of Defense released this photo on May 2, 2011, showing the compound
(highlighted) from above.
Layout
The Department of Defense released this graphic of the compound on May 2, 2011.

48. Crashed Helicopter
The remains of a helicopter that made a hard landing during the operation lies near the compound in
Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011.
Removal
Pakistani soldiers remove pieces of the downed helicopter in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011.

49. Convoy
Military trucks cart the covered debris of the helicopter away from Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011.
Pulling
Soldiers escort the trucks with the helicopter's remains out of Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011.

50. Rooftop
A soldier stands on the roof of the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011.
Press
Pakistani security officials grant access to journalists on May 3, 2011, to cover the compound where
Osama Bin Laden was killed by US military forces, in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

51. Barbed
Residents look up towards a military helicopter flying over the compound where al Qaeda leader Osama
bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, May 4, 2011.
The Interrupted Reading: The Kids with
George W. Bush on 9/11
By TIM PADGETT Tuesday, May 03, 2011
President George W. Bush, at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla., listens as chief of
staff Andrew Card informs him of a second attack on the World Trade Center Win McNamee / Reuters

52. There has rarely been a starker juxtaposition of evil and innocence than the moment President George W.
Bush received the news about 9/11 while reading The Pet Goat with second-graders in Sarasota, Fla.
Seven-year-olds can't understand what Islamic terrorism is all about. But they know when an adult's face
is telling them something is wrong — and none of the students sitting in Sandra Kay Daniels' class at
Emma E. Booker Elementary School that morning can forget the devastating change in Bush's
expression when White House chief of staff Andrew Card whispered the terrible news of the al-Qaeda
attack. Lazaro Dubrocq's heart started racing because he assumed they were all in trouble — with no
less than the Commander in Chief — but he wasn't sure why. "In a heartbeat, he leaned back and he
looked flabbergasted, shocked, horrified," recalls Dubrocq, now 17. "I was baffled. I mean, did we read
something wrong? Was he mad or disappointed in us?"
Chantal Guerrero and Mariah Williams, both 16 Bob Croslin for TIME
Similar fears started running through Mariah Williams' head. "I don't remember the story we were reading
— was it about pigs?" says Williams, 16. "But I'll always remember watching his face turn red. He got
really serious all of a sudden. But I was clueless. I was just 7. I'm just glad he didn't get up and leave,
because then I would have been more scared and confused." Chantal Guerrero, 16, agrees. Even today,
she's grateful that Bush regained his composure and stayed with the students until The Pet Goat was
finished. "I think the President was trying to keep us from finding out," says Guerrero, "so we all wouldn't
freak out."
Even if that didn't happen, it's apparent that the sharing of that terrifying Tuesday with Bush has affected
those students in the decade since — and, they say, it made the news of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin
Laden's killing by U.S. commandos on May 1 all the more meaningful. Dubrocq, now a junior at Riverview
High School in Sarasota, doubts that he would be a student in the rigorous international-baccalaureate
program if he hadn't been with the President as one of history's most infamous global events unfolded.
"Because of that," he says, "I came to realize as I grew up that the world is a much bigger place and that
there are differing opinions about us out there, not all of them good."
Guerrero, today a junior at the Sarasota Military Academy, believes the experience "has since given us
all a better understanding of the situation, sort of made us take it all more seriously. At that age, I couldn't
understand how anyone could take innocent lives that way. And I still of course can't. But today I can
problem-solve it all a lot better, maybe better than other kids because I was kind of part of it." Williams,
also a junior at the military academy, says those moments spent with Bush conferred on the kids a sort of

53. historical authority as they grew up. "Today, when we talk about 9/11 in class and you hear kids make
mistakes about what happened with the President that day, I can tell them they're wrong," she says,
"because I was there."
Lazaro Dubrocq, 17 Bob Croslin for TIME
One thing the students would like to tell Bush's critics — like liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, whose
2004 documentary Fahrenheit 911 disparaged Bush for lingering almost 10 minutes with the students
after getting word that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center — is that they think the
President did the right thing. "I think he was trying to keep everybody calm, starting with us," says
Guerrero. Dubrocq agrees: "I think he was trying to protect us." Booker Principal Gwendolyn Tose-Rigell,
who died in 2007, later insisted, "I don't think anyone could have handled it better. What would it have
served if [Bush] had jumped out of his chair and ran out of the room?"
When the children's story was done, Bush left for the school's library, where he discussed the New York
City, Washington and Pennsylvania nightmare with aides, reporters and another group of students
waiting for him. Back in the classroom, Daniels brought in a television and turned on the first bewildering
images of the Twin Towers in flames and smoke. At that point, the kids started connecting the dots. "It
was pretty scary," says Williams, "and I remember thinking, So that's why the President looked so mad."
Dubrocq got mad himself. "But I had to wait a few years before I could digest what had really happened
and why they attacked us," he says. "I, of course, grew up to have nothing but contempt for Osama bin
Laden." Yet he adds the episode "motivated me to get a better handle on the world and to want to help
improve the world." It also made Dubrocq, who wants to study international business, more aware of his
multinational roots — he's French and Cuban on his father's side and Spanish and Mexican on his
mother's. Not surprisingly, he also wants to learn other languages, like Chinese and, in an echo of his
9/11 memories, perhaps even Arabic.
Williams says she also hated bin Laden more as she grew up and gained a better appreciation of how
fanatics had changed her world on 9/11. "All that just because he wanted to control everybody in the
world, control how we think and what we do," she says. Williams doesn't plan to pursue a military career
— she wants to be a veterinarian — but the military-academy student was impressed by the Navy Seal
raid in Pakistan that killed bin Laden: "I was shocked. I thought after 10 years, they'd never find him. But
what the SEALs did, it, like, gives me even more respect for that kind of training."

54. Guerrero, in fact, may as well be part of that training. She also plans a civilian life — she hopes to study
art and musical theater — but she's a Junior ROTC member and part of her school's state champion
Raiders team, which competes against other academies in contests like rope-bridge races, map
navigation and marksmanship. In other words, the same sort of skills the Seal commandos have to
master. She admits to feeling an added rush when she woke up to Monday morning's news: the Seals'
operation, she says, "was very, very cool."
More than cool, Guerrero adds, it was also "so reassuring, after a whole decade of being scared about
these things." Most of all, it "brought back a flood of memories" of their tragic morning with a President —
memories that prove kids can carry a lot heavier stuff in those plastic backpacks than adults often realize.
The 25th Hour
By JAMES PONIEWOZIK Friday, May 20, 2011
The decade was defined by 24's Jack Bauer
Everett
The day Osama bin Laden died, his name was paired once again with the agent whose illustrious career
he helped make possible. The Twitter trending-topics list — that social-media pulse meter that tracks
what people are posting about most often — filled up with references to OBL's demise: "Navy Seals,"
"Abbottabad," "God Bless America." And one more: "Jack Bauer," the counterterrorism ace played by
Kiefer Sutherland who foiled attacks in real time on Fox's 24. "Right now," quipped user Nick Schug,
"Jack Bauer is washing his hands and changing out of his bloody clothes."
It was a joke, yes, but it was also catharsis. The operation that took out al-Qaeda's leader was satisfying
because it matched the retribution scenario you might have scripted in that dark autumn of 2001: The
helicopters, the explosions, the villain blazing out with gunfire in his gangsta million-dollar compound. A
shot to the head, and roll credits. An era that began with a scene from a Michael Bay movie — people

55. running down city streets from a billowing cloud of dust and rubble — ended like a season finale of 24. It
was a fitting finish to a saga that framed, and was framed by, pop culture.
Bin Laden and 9/11 generally didn't change our culture in the ways predicted. They did not — contra a
TIME column written after the attacks — mean "the end of irony." (If anything, we saw the opposite, from
hipsters wearing trucker hats to the passionate ironies of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.) They did not
spell the end of gory violence in entertainment, the birth of a postpartisan media or the dawn of West
Wing — like elevated discourse.
In a way, this stubbornness was the perfect riposte to an extremism driven in part by hatred of the secular
West. Pop culture stayed defiantly trashy. Within months of the Twin Towers' falling, America was
fascinated by The Osbournes. In 2001 we had the summer of Gary Condit and shark attacks; in 2011 we
had the winter of Charlie Sheen's tiger blood.
But American culture still absorbed the new wars, playing them for history, tragedy and farce. The
sacrifices of the airline passengers who died in Shanksville, Pa., saving the White House were
commemorated in United 93. New York City's ache (and survivors' guilt) over 9/11 was rendered with
black-humored bile by Denis Leary's Rescue Me. The decade's greatest sitcom, Arrested Development,
was on one level an extended satire of the Iraq war. Cable series from The Shield to Battlestar Galactica
handled the wars' dark lessons metaphorically.
The 9/11 attacks didn't create 24; the series pilot was filmed well before Sept. 11. (It premiered that
November.) The show ended in 2010, having — maybe like bin Laden — outlived its relevance. But the
terrorism era gave it urgency, made Bauer an icon and drove its story lines deep into America's
subconscious. After 9/11, 24 confronted Islamic (and other) extremism and ratcheted up the mass
destruction — nuke, bio, chemical and otherwise. It posited an agency, the CTU, which never met a
threat it couldn't neutralize in a day with a little computer hacking and finger breaking.
The series at times played like an ad for the Rumsfeld School of Enhanced Interrogation. But it was
always more complicated than detractors gave it credit for. Season 2 involved a conspiracy to trick the
U.S. into a Middle East war on the basis of phony evidence — this in early 2003, when Washington could
still say the word yellowcake with a straight face. And Bauer, a sorrowful warrior, became regretful about
the use of torture in later seasons.
In the end, 24 seduced viewers not with ideology but with competence, which — from the phantom
WMDs to the Valerie Plame fiasco to Tora Bora — real life was not providing in abundance. And Jack
Bauer made the fantasy personal. Imagine if a Predator drone had vaporized bin Laden from 10,000 ft.
(3,000 m). Sure, it would have been celebrated. But a push-button assassination would not have felt like
knowing that one of us was there, in a room, and popped that son of a bitch.
That too was what 24 was about: emotional, not just operational, wish fulfillment. Jack Bauer was
personally invested: his wife was murdered by her terrorist kidnappers; his daughter was abducted; he
lost friends. He, like his country, was just so damn tired.

56. The Abbottabad raid, like Bauer's victories, gave us a feeling of agency. But like many reruns, it came
with a bittersweet nostalgia. It brought the closure we wanted with the knowledge that we had wanted it a
decade before, when you could say the country felt something like a unity of purpose. (This is the same
nostalgia Fox's Glenn Beck traded on with his — ironically divisive — 9/12 Project.)
After bin Laden died, there was that brief feeling of unity again. But now we know how that show ends.
Not 24 hours after the news, there was chatter about the attack's effects on the President's re-election
and the appropriateness of his speech. There were even theories that the whole thing was faked —
another resonance with the paranoid 24, where the "dead" regularly returned to life.
Even at this extraordinary time, you could see our eventual return to ordinary form — the form the media
was in when we busied ourselves with birtherism, royal marriage and celeb meltdowns like cats batting at
so many Christmas ornaments. Our news cycle, after all, demands constant distraction. And, like Jack
Bauer, every dawn it faces another longest day.

57. The Story of X
By RICHARD STENGEL Friday, May 20, 2011
Adolf Hitler, May 7, 1945
MAY 7, 1945
APRIL 21, 2003
JUNE 19, 2006
For the fourth time in our history, we've put a
red X over a face on our cover. The first time
marked the death of Adolf Hitler in 1945. In
2003 we revived the X for Saddam Hussein on the occasion of the U.S.-led coalition's takeover of
Baghdad. Three years later, we put it on the face of Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the scourge of Iraq. Now we
use it to signal the death of the world's most-infamous terrorist, Osama bin Laden.
Saddam Hussein, April 21, 2003
Bin Laden's death is the bookend to an
extraordinary decade that began with the
9/11 attacks. He lived in our imagination, in
our fears and, as it turns out, in a quiet
suburb of Islamabad. His death comes at a
time when his influence was at a low ebb. In
all the conflicts and victories of this riotous
Arab Spring, no one has been chanting his
name or carrying his image. But in a curious
way, his death brings him back front and
center, if only for a moment. It is the end of
an era in some ways, but not the end of our
struggle against terrorism.