Archive for the 'Passings' Category

Osama Bin Laden

Osama Bin Laden, leader of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda, FBI’s Most Wanted, mastermind behind the terrorist attacks of the September 11th attacks, has been killed by American forces within a compound 35 miles north of Islamabad, Pakistan.

The surprise announcement was made in the waning hours of Sunday night, when President Barack Obama scheduled an impromptu, late night press conference in the East Room of the White House, on an undisclosed topic. As speculation began to mount about what had transpired, news outlets began confirming the death of Public Enemy No. 1 before the President made a short address, announcing some of the specifics behind the military action taken, while also calling for the country to be as unified as it had been in the hours following the attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon and the plane crash in Shanksville, Penn.

According to Obama, intelligence had been gathered since the beginning of last fall about the compound in Abbottabad, an affluent suburb of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. A team of highly trained Navy Seals infiltrated the base, killing five others along with Bin Laden. No Americans were injured in the operation.

As news began to spread on sundry social media outlets, celebrations began to spill out into the streets. Along Pennsylvania Avenue, a large crowd gathered at the gates of the White House, chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” and breaking into verses of the Star Spangled Banner. At Ground Zero, the site of the terrorist attacks in New York City, crowds were also embracing one another, celebrating the death of the man who had taken so much from them and the rest of the country nearly a decade ago.

President Obama called President George W. Bush, sitting President during the attacks in 2001, to give him the news personally. As Bush had promised at the rubble in New York City, and Obama declared almost ten years later, “justice has been done.”