Just so it's official

Rico says he didn't stay up to watch it, but Peter Baker, Helene Cooper, and Mark Mazzetti have an article in The New York Times on the President's speech to the nation:

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the most devastating attack on American soil in modern times, and the most hunted man in the world, was killed in a firefight with United States forces in Pakistan on Sunday, President Obama announced. In a late-night appearance in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Obama declared that “justice has been done”, as he disclosed that American military and CIA operatives had finally cornered Bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, who had eluded them for nearly a decade. American officials said Bin Laden resisted and was shot in the head. He was later buried at sea.
The news touched off an extraordinary outpouring of emotion as crowds gathered outside the White House, in Times Square and at the ground zero site, waving American flags, cheering, shouting, laughing, and chanting, “USA, USA!” In New York City, crowds sang The Star-Spangled Banner. Throughout downtown Washington, drivers honked horns deep into the night.
“For over two decades, Bin Laden has been al-Qaeda’s leader and symbol,” the president said in a statement broadcast around the world. “The death of Bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaeda. But his death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that al-Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must and we will remain vigilant at home and abroad.”
Bin Laden’s demise is a defining moment in the American-led fight against terrorism, a symbolic stroke affirming the relentlessness of the pursuit of those who attacked New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. What remains to be seen, however, is whether it galvanizes Bin Laden’s followers by turning him into a martyr, or serves as a turning of the page in the war in Afghanistan and gives further impetus to Mr. Obama to bring American troops home.
How much his death will affect al-Qaeda itself remains unclear. For years, as they failed to find him, American leaders have said that he was more symbolically important than operationally significant because he was on the run and hindered in any meaningful leadership role. Yet he remained the most potent face of terrorism around the world, and some of those who played down his role in recent years nonetheless celebrated his death.
Given Bin Laden’s status among radicals, the American government braced for possible retaliation. A senior Pentagon official said late Sunday that military bases in the United States and around the world were ordered to a higher state of readiness. The State Department issued a worldwide travel warning, urging Americans in volatile areas “to limit their travel outside of their homes and hotels and avoid mass gatherings and demonstrations.”
The strike could deepen tensions with Pakistan, which has periodically bristled at American counterterrorism efforts even as Bin Laden evidently found safe refuge on its territory for nearly a decade. Since taking office, Mr. Obama has ordered significantly more drone strikes on suspected terrorist targets in Pakistan, stirring public anger there and prompting the Pakistani government to protest.
When the end came for Bin Laden, he was found, not in the remote tribal areas along the Pakistani-Afghan border where he has long been presumed to be sheltered, but in a massive compound about an hour’s drive north from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. He was hiding in the medium-sized city of Abbottabad, home to a large Pakistani military base and a military academy of the Pakistani Army.
The compound, only about a third of a mile from the academy, is at the end of a narrow dirt road and is roughly eight times larger than other homes in the area, but had no telephone or Internet connections. When American operatives converged on the house on Sunday, Bin Laden “resisted the assault force” and was killed in the middle of an intense gun battle, a senior administration official said, but details were still sketchy early Monday morning.
The official said that military and intelligence officials first learned last summer that a “high-value target” was being protected in the compound and began working on a plan for going in to get him. Beginning in March, Mr. Obama presided over five national security meetings at the White House to go over plans for the operation and on Friday morning, just before leaving Washington to tour tornado damage in Alabama, gave the final order for members of the Navy Seals and CIA operatives to strike.
Mr. Obama called it a “targeted operation,” although officials said one helicopter was lost because of a mechanical failure and had to be destroyed to keep it from falling into hostile hands.
In addition to Bin Laden, three men were killed during the forty-minute raid, one believed to be his son and the other two his couriers, according to an American official who briefed reporters under White House ground rules forbidding further identification. A woman was killed when she was used as a shield by a male combatant, the official said, and two others wounded.
“No Americans were harmed,” Mr. Obama said. “They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.” Muslim tradition requires burial within 24 hours but, by doing it at sea, American authorities presumably were trying to avoid creating a shrine for his followers.
The whereabouts of Ayman al-Zawahri, al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, were unclear.
Bin Laden’s death came nearly ten years after al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four American passenger jets, crashing three of them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside Washington. The fourth hijacked jet, United Flight 93, crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside after passengers fought the militants.
“This is important news for us, and for the world,” said Gordon Felt, president of the group, Families of Flight 93. “It cannot ease our pain, or bring back our loved ones. It does bring a measure of comfort that the mastermind of the September 11th tragedy and the face of global terror can no longer spread his evil.”
The mostly young people who celebrated in the streets of New York and Washington saw it as a historic moment, one that for many of them culminated a worldwide manhunt that started when they were children. Some climbed trees and lampposts directly in front of the White House to cheer and wave flags. Cigars and noisemakers were common. One group started singing, “Osama, Osama, hey, hey, hey, goodbye.”
Maureen Hasson, 22, a recent college graduate working for the Justice Department, came down to Lafayette Square in a fuchsia party dress and flip-flops. “This is full circle for our generation,” she said. “Just look around at the average age here. We were all in middle school when the terrorists struck. We all vividly remember 9/11 and this is the close of that chapter.”
Sam Sherman, 18, a freshman at George Washington University and originally from New York, also rushed down to the White House. “The feeling you can’t even imagine, the feeling in the air. It’s crazy,” he said. “I have friends with parents dead because of Osama bin Laden’s plan, okay. So when I heard this news, I came down to celebrate.”
Mr. Obama said Pakistan had helped develop the intelligence that led to Bin Laden, but an American official said the Pakistani government was not informed about the strike in advance. “We shared our intelligence on this compound with no other country,” the official said.
Mr. Obama recalled his statements in the 2008 presidential campaign when he vowed to order American forces to strike inside Pakistan if necessary even without Islamabad’s permission. “That is what we’ve done,” he said. “But it’s important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to Bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding.”
Relations with Pakistan had fallen in recent weeks to their lowest point in years. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly criticized the Pakistani military two weeks ago for failing to act against extremists allied to al-Qaeda who shelter in the tribal areas of North Waziristan. Last week, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, head of the Pakistani Army, said Pakistan had broken the back of terrorism on its territory, prompting skepticism in Washington.
Mr. Obama called President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan to tell him about the strike after it was set in motion, and his advisers called their Pakistani counterparts. “They agree that this is a good and historic day for both of our nations,” Mr. Obama said.
The city of Abbottabad where Bin Laden was found has had other known al-Qaeda presence in the past. A senior Indonesian militant, Umar Patek, was arrested there earlier this year. Mr. Patek was protected by an al-Qaeda operative, a clerk who worked undercover at the main post office, a signal that al-Qaeda may have had other operations in the area.
The Pakistani military cordoned off the roads and alleys leading to the compound, but residents of the middle-class area who were reached by phone said they had not been suspicious about the residents of the house, despite its size and the fact that very few people ever seemed to leave the compound.
As the operation’s start approached, many American officials at the United States consulate in Peshawar, the capital of the northwest area of Pakistan, were told suddenly to depart last Friday, leaving behind only a core group of essential staff. The American officials said they had been told to leave because of fears of kidnapping, but were not tipped off to the operation.
Analysts said Bin Laden’s death amounted to a double blow for al-Qaeda, after its sermons of anti-Western violence seemed to be rendered irrelevant by the wave of political upheaval rolling through the Arab world.
“It comes at a time when al-Qaeda’s narrative is already very much in doubt in the Arab world,” said Martin S. Indyk, vice president and director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. “Its narrative was that violence was the way to redeem Arab honor and dignity. But Osama bin Laden and his violence didn’t succeed in unseating anybody.”
al-Qaeda sympathizers reacted with disbelief, anger and in some cases talk of retribution. On a website considered an outlet for al-Qaeda messages, forum administrators deleted posts by users announcing Bin Laden’s death and demanded that members wait until the news was confirmed by al-Qaeda sources, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors radicals.Even so, SITE said, sympathizers on the forum posted messages calling Bin Laden a martyr and suggesting retaliation: “America will reap the same if the news is true and false,” said one message. “The lions will remain lions and will continue moving in the footsteps of Usama,” said another, using an alternate spelling of Bin Laden’s name.
In the United States, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy organization, said it welcomed Bin Laden’s death. “As we have stated repeatedly since the 9/11 terror attacks, Bin Laden never represented Muslims or Islam,” the group said in a statement. “In fact, in addition to the killing of thousands of Americans, he and al-Qaeda caused the deaths of countless Muslims worldwide.”
Mr. Obama called to inform his predecessor, George W. Bush, who started the war against al-Qaeda after 11 September, yet was frustrated in his efforts to capture Bin Laden “dead or alive” as he once put it. Mr. Bush released a statement saying, “this momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on 11 September 2001. The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done,” he added.
Mr. Obama used similar language, and warned that the war against terrorists had not ended. “We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies,” he said. “We will be true to the values that make us who we are. And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to al-Qaeda’s terror, justice has been done.” The president was careful to add that, as Mr. Bush did during his presidency, the United States is not at war with Islam. “Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims,” Mr. Obama said. “Indeed, al-Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own. So his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity.”

Another bad one gone

Kate Zernike and Michael Kaufman have an obituary, of sorts, for Osama bin Laden in The New York Times:

Osama bin Laden, killed in Pakistan on Sunday, was a son of the Saudi elite, whose radical, violent campaign to recreate a seventh-century Muslim empire redefined the threat of terrorism for the 21st century. With the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, Bin Laden was elevated to the realm of evil in the American imagination once reserved for dictators like Hitler and Stalin. He was a new national enemy, his face on wanted posters, gloating on videotapes, taunting the United States and Western civilization.
“Do you want Bin Laden dead?” a reporter asked President George W. Bush six days after the 11 September attacks. “I want him... I want justice,” the president answered. “And there’s an old poster out West, as I recall, that said: Wanted: Dead or Alive.”
It took nearly a decade before that quest finally ended in Pakistan with the death of Bin Laden, during a confrontation with American forces who attacked a compound where officials said he had been hiding.
The manhunt was punctuated by a battle in December of 2001, at an Afghan mountain redoubt called Tora Bora, near the border with Pakistan, where Bin Laden and his allies were hiding. Despite days of pounding by American bombers, Bin Laden escaped. For more than nine years afterward, he remained an elusive, shadowy figure frustratingly beyond the grasp of his pursuers and thought to be hiding somewhere in Pakistan and plotting new attacks.
Long before, he had become a hero in much of the Islamic world, as much a myth as a man; what a longtime CIA officer called “the North Star” of global terrorism. He had united disparate militant groups, from Egypt to Chechnya, from Yemen to the Philippines, under the banner of al-Qaeda and his ideal of a borderless brotherhood of radical Islam.
Terrorism before Bin Laden was often state-sponsored, but he was a terrorist who had sponsored a state. For five years, 1996 to 2001, he paid for the protection of the Taliban, then the rulers of Afghanistan. He bought the time and the freedom to make al-Qaeda (which means “the base”) a multinational enterprise to export terror around the globe.
For years after the 11 September attacks, the name of al-Qaeda and the fame of Bin Laden spread like a 21st-century political plague. Groups calling themselves al-Qaeda, or acting in the name of its cause, attacked American troops in Iraq, bombed tourist spots in Bali, and blew up passenger trains in Spain.
To this day, the precise reach of his power remains unknown: how many members al-Qaeda could truly count on; how many countries its cells had penetrated; and whether, as Bin Laden boasted, he sought to arm al-Qaeda with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.
He waged holy war with distinctly modern methods. He sent fatwas (religious decrees) by fax, and declared war on Americans in an email beamed by satellite around the world. al-Qaeda members kept bomb-making manuals on CD, and communicated with encrypted memos on laptops, leading one American official to declare that Bin Laden possessed better communications technology than the United States. He railed against globalization, even as his agents in Europe and North America took advantage of a globalized world to carry out their attacks, insinuating themselves into the very Western culture he despised.
He styled himself a Muslim ascetic, a billionaire’s son who gave up a life of privilege for the cause. But he was media savvy and acutely image conscious; before a CNN crew that interviewed him in 1997 was allowed to leave, his media advisers insisted on editing out unflattering shots. He summoned reporters to a cave in Afghanistan when he needed to get his message out but, like the most controlling of CEOs, he insisted on receiving written questions in advance.
His reedy voice seemed to belie the warrior image he cultivated, a man whose constant companion was a Kalashnikov rifle that he boasted he had taken from a Russian soldier he had killed. The world’s most threatening terrorist, he was also known to submit to frequent dressings down by his mother. While he built his reputation on his combat experience against Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s, even some of his supporters questioned whether he had actually fought. And, though he claimed to follow the purest form of Islam, many scholars insisted that he was glossing over the faith’s edicts against killing innocents and civilians. Islam draws boundaries on where and why holy war can be waged; Bin Laden declared the entire world fair territory. Yet it was the United States, Bin Laden insisted, that was guilty of a double standard. “It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us, and then wants us to agree to all this,” he told CNN in the 1997 interview. “If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists. When Palestinian children throw stones against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. says they are terrorists. Whereas when Israel bombed the United Nations building in Lebanon while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel. At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the top official of the Irish Republican Army at the White House as a political leader. Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world.”
For Bin Laden, as for the United States, the turning point came in 1989, with the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan. For the United States, which had supported the Afghan resistance with billions of dollars in arms and ammunition, that defeat marked the beginning of the end of the cold war and the birth of a new world order.
Bin Laden, who had supported the resistance with money, construction equipment, and housing, saw the retreat of the Soviets as an affirmation of Muslim power and an opportunity to recreate Islamic political power and topple infidel governments through jihad, or holy war. He declared to an interviewer, “I am confident that Muslims will be able to end the legend of the so-called superpower that is America.”
In its place, he built his own legend, modeling himself after the Prophet Muhammad who, in the seventh century, led the Muslim people to rout the infidels, or nonbelievers, from North Africa and the Middle East. As the Koran had been revealed to Muhammad amid intense persecution, Bin Laden saw his own expulsions during the 1990s, from Saudi Arabia and then Sudan, as affirmation of himself as a chosen one.
In his vision, he would be the emir. or prince, in a restoration of the khalifa, a political empire extending from Afghanistan across the globe. “These countries belong to Islam,” he told the same interviewer in 1998, “not the rulers.”
al-Qaeda became the infrastructure for his dream. Under it, Bin Laden created a web of businesses— some legitimate, some less so— to obtain and move the weapons, chemicals, and money he needed. He created training camps for his foot soldiers, a media office to spread his word, and even shuras, or councils, to approve his military plans and his fatwas.
Through the ’90s, al-Qaeda evolved into a far-flung and loosely connected network of symbiotic relationships: Bin Laden gave affiliated terrorist groups money, training, and expertise and they gave him operational cover and a furthering of his cause. Perhaps the most important of those alliances was with the Taliban, who rose to power in Afghanistan largely on the strength of Bin Laden’s aid, and in turn provided him refuge and a launching pad for holy war.
Long before 11 September, though the evidentiary trails were often thin, American officials considered Bin Laden at least in part responsible for the killing of American soldiers in Somalia and in Saudi Arabia; the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993; the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia; and a foiled plot to hijack a dozen jets, crash a plane into CIA headquarters, and kill President Bill Clinton.
In 1996, the officials described Bin Laden as “one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremism in the world.” But he was thought at the time to be primarily a financier of terrorism, not someone capable of orchestrating international terrorist plots. Yet, when the United States put out a list of the most wanted terrorists in 1997, neither Bin Laden nor al-Qaeda was on it.
Bin Laden, however, demanded to be noticed. In February of 1998, he declared it the duty of every Muslim to “kill Americans wherever they are found”. After the bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa in August 1998, President Clinton declared Bin Laden “Public Enemy Number One.”
The CIA spent much of the next three years hunting Bin Laden. The goal was to capture him with recruited Afghan agents, or to kill him with a precision-guided missile, according to the 2004 report of the 9/11 Commission and the memoirs of George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence from July of 1997 to July of 2004.
The intelligence was never good enough to pull the trigger. By the summer of 2001, the CIA was convinced that al-Qaeda was on the verge of a spectacular attack. But no one knew where or when it would come.
By accounts of people close to the family, Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden was born in 1957, the seventh son and the seventeenth child, among fifty or more, of his father.
His father, Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden, had immigrated to what would soon become Saudi Arabia in 1931 from the family’s ancestral village in a conservative province of southern Yemen. He found work in Jidda as a porter to the pilgrims on their way to the holy city of Mecca; years later, when he would own the largest construction company in Saudi Arabia, he displayed his porter’s bag in the main reception room of his palace as a reminder of his humble origins.
According to family friends, the Bin Laden family’s rise began with a risk, when the father offered to build a palace for King Saud in the 1950s for far less than the lowest bid. By the 1960s, he had ingratiated himself so well with the Saudi royal family that King Faisal decreed that all construction projects be awarded to the Bin Laden group. The senior Bin Laden was chosen to restore the al-Aksa mosque in Jerusalem, and his company later refurbished the mosques at Mecca and Medina. Osama bin Laden would go on to portray his father as devoutly religious, recalling proudly in interviews that while restoring al-Aksa, his father sometimes prayed in three mosques in one day. Other family members challenged that depiction, however, saying that, while the elder Bin Laden was observant, he was far less devout than his son.
All of the Bin Laden children were required to work for the family company, meaning that Osama spent summers working on road projects. The senior Bin Laden died in a plane crash when Osama was ten. The siblings each inherited millions, though the precise amount was a matter of some debate, and led a life of near-royalty. Osama (the name means “young lion”) grew up playing with Saudi princes and had his own stable of horses by age fifteen.
But some people close to the family paint a portrait of Bin Laden as a misfit. His mother, the last of his father’s four wives, was from Syria, the only one of the wives not from Saudi Arabia. The elder Bin Laden had met her on a vacation, and Osama was their only child. Within the family, she was said to be known as “the slave” and Osama “the slave child.”
Within the Saudi elite, it was rare to have both parents born outside the kingdom. In a profile of Osama bin Laden in The New Yorker, Mary Anne Weaver quoted a family friend who suggested that he had felt alienated in a culture that so obsessed over lineage, saying: “It must have been difficult for him, Osama was almost a double outsider. His paternal roots are in Yemen, and within the family, his mother was a double outsider as well; she was neither Saudi nor Yemeni but Syrian.”
According to one of his brothers, Osama was the only one of the Bin Laden children who never traveled abroad to study. A biography of Bin Laden, provided to the PBS television program Frontline by an unidentified family friend, asserted that Bin Laden never traveled outside the Middle East. That lack of exposure to Western culture would prove a crucial distinction; the other siblings went on to lead lives that would not be unfamiliar to most Americans. They took over the family business, estimated to be worth billions, distributing Snapple drinks, Volkswagens, and Disney products across the Middle East. On 11 September 2001, several Bin Laden siblings were living in the United States.
Bin Laden had been educated, indeed, steeped, as many Saudi children are, in Wahhabi, the puritanical, ardently anti-Western strain of Islam. Even years later, he so despised the Saudi ruling family’s coziness with Western nations that he refused to refer to Saudi Arabia by its modern name, instead calling it “the Country of the Two Holy Places”.
Newspapers have quoted anonymous sources, in particular an unidentified Lebanese barber, about a wild period of drinking and womanizing in Bin Laden’s life. But by most accounts he was devout and quiet, marrying a relative, the first of his four wives, at age seventeen.
Soon afterward, he began earning a degree at King Abdulaziz University in Jiddah. It was there that he shaped his militancy. He became involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, a group of Islamic radicals who believed that much of the Muslim world, including the leaders of Saudi Arabia, lived as infidels, in violation of the true meaning of the Quran.
And he fell under the influence of two Islamic scholars: Muhammad Quttub and Abdullah Azzam, whose ideas would become the underpinnings for al-Qaeda. Mr. Azzam became a mentor to the young Bin Laden. Jihad was the responsibility of all Muslims, he taught, until the lands once held by Islam were reclaimed. His motto: “Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences, and no dialogue.”
The Middle East was becoming increasingly unsettled in 1979, when Bin Laden was at the university. In Iran, Shi'ite Muslims mounted an Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah and began to make the United States a target. Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty. As the year ended, Soviet troops occupied Afghanistan.
Bin Laden arrived in Pakistan on the border of Afghanistan within two weeks of the occupation. He said later that he had been asked to go by Saudi officials, who were eager to support the resistance movement. In his book Taliban, the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid said that the Saudis had originally hoped that a member of the royal family might serve as an inspirational leader in Afghanistan, but that they settled on Bin Laden as the next closest thing when no princes volunteered. He traveled like a visiting diplomat more than a soldier, meeting with leaders and observing the refugees coming into Peshawar, Pakistan. As the family friend says, it “was an exploratory rather than an action trip”. He would return twice a year for the next few years, in between finishing his degree and lobbying family members to support the Afghan mujahedeen.
Bin Laden began traveling beyond the border into Afghanistan in 1982, bringing with him construction machinery and recruits. In 1984, he and Mr. Azzam began setting up guesthouses in Peshawar, which served as the first stop for holy warriors on their way to Afghanistan. With the money they had raised in Saudi Arabia, they established the Office of Services, which branched out across the world to recruit young jihadists.
The men came to be known as the Afghan Arabs, though they came from all over the world, and their numbers were estimated as high as 20,000. By 1986, Bin Laden had begun setting up training camps for them as well, and he was paying roughly $25,000 a month to subsidize them.
To young would-be recruits across the Arab world, Bin Laden’s was an attractive story: the rich young man who had become a warrior. His own descriptions of the battles he had seen, how he lost the fear of death, and slept in the face of artillery fire, were brushstrokes of an almost divine figure.
But intelligence sources insist that Bin Laden actually saw combat only once, in a weeklong barrage by the Soviets at Jaji, where the Arab Afghans had dug themselves into caves using Bin Laden’s construction equipment.
“Afghanistan, the jihad, was one terrific photo op for a lot of people,” Milton Bearden, the CIA officer who described Bin Laden as “the North Star,” said in an interview on Frontline, adding, “There’s a lot of fiction in there.”
Still, Jaji became a kind of touchstone in the Bin Laden myth. Stories sent back from the battle to Arab newspaper readers, and photographs of Bin Laden in combat gear, burnished his image.
The flood of young men following him to Afghanistan prompted the founding of al-Qaeda. The genesis was essentially bureaucratic; Bin Laden wanted a way to track the men so he could tell their families what had happened to them. The documentation al-Qaeda provided became a primitive database of young jihadists.
Afghanistan also brought Bin Laden into contact with leaders of other militant Islamic groups, including Ayman al-Zawahri, the bespectacled doctor who would later appear at Bin Laden’s side in televised messages from the caves of Afghanistan. Ultimately Dr. Zawahri’s group, Egyptian Jihad, and others would merge with al-Qaeda, making it an umbrella for various terrorist groups.
Through the looking glass of 11 Septmber, it seemed ironic that the Americans and Osama bin Laden had fought on the same side against the Soviets in Afghanistan; as if the Americans had somehow created the Bin Laden monster by providing arms and cash to the Arabs. The complex at Tora Bora where al-Qaeda members hid had been created with the help of the CIA as a base for the Afghans fighting the Soviets.
Bin Laden himself described the fight in Afghanistan this way: “There I received volunteers who came from the Saudi kingdom, and from all over the Arab and Muslim countries. I set up my first camp where these volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis.” In truth, however, the American contact was not directly with Bin Laden; both worked through the middlemen of the Pakistani intelligence service.
In the revisionism of the Bin Laden myth, his defenders would later say that he had not worked with the Americans, but that he had only tolerated them as a means to his end. As proof, they insisted he had made anti-American statements as early as 1980.
Bin Laden would say, in retrospect, that he was always aware who his enemies were: “For us, the idea was not to get involved more than necessary in the fight against the Russians, which was the business of the Americans, but rather to show our solidarity with our Islamist brothers,” he told a French journalist in 1995. “I discovered that it was not enough to fight in Afghanistan, but that we had to fight on all fronts against Communism or Western oppression. The urgent thing was Communism, but the next target was America.”
Afghanistan had infused the movement with confidence. “Most of what we benefited from was that the myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims,” Bin Laden later told an interviewer. “Slumber and fatigue vanished, and so was the terror which the U.S. would use in its media by attributing itself superpower status, or which the Soviet Union used by attributing itself as a superpower.” He returned to Saudi Arabia, welcomed as a hero, and took up the family business. But Saudi royals grew increasingly wary of him as he became more outspoken against the government. The breaking point for Bin Laden and for the Saudis came when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August of 1990. Bin Laden volunteered to the Saudis that the men and equipment he had used in Afghanistan could defend the kingdom. He was “shocked,” a family friend said, to learn that the Americans, the enemy, in his mind, would defend it instead. To him, it was the height of American arrogance. The United States, he told an interviewer later, “has started to look at itself as a master of this world and established what it calls the new world order.”
The Saudi government restricted him to Jiddah, fearing that his outspokenness would offend the Americans. Bin Laden fled to the Sudan, which was offering itself as a sort of haven for terrorists, and there he began setting up legitimate businesses that would help finance al-Qaeda. He also built his reserves, in 1992, paying for about 500 mujahedeen who had been expelled from Pakistan to come work for him. It was during that time that it is believed he honed his resolve against the United States.
Within al-Qaeda, he argued that the organization should put aside its differences with Shi'ite terrorist groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the better to concentrate on the common enemy: the United States. He called for attacks against American forces in the Saudi peninsula and in the Horn of Africa.
On 29 December 1992, a bomb exploded in a hotel in Aden, Yemen, where American troops had been staying while on their way to Somalia. The troops had already left, and the bomb killed two Austrian tourists. American intelligence officials later came to believe that that was the first Bin Laden attack.
On 26 February 1993, a bomb exploded in a truck driven into the underground garage at the World Trade Center, killing six people. Bin Laden later praised Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of the bombing. In October of that year in Somalia, eighteen American service members were killed, some of their bodies dragged through the streets, while on a peacekeeping mission; Bin Laden was almost giddy about the deaths.
After leaving Afghanistan, the Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and prepared for a long battle, thinking that the Americans were “like the Russians”, he told an interviewer. “The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers, and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat,” he said. “And America forgot all the hoopla and media propaganda about being the world leader and the leader of the new world order, and after a few blows, they forgot about this title and left, dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat.”
By 1994, Bin Laden had established new training camps in the Sudan, but he became a man without a country. The Saudi government froze his assets and revoked his citizenship. His family, which had become rich on its relations to the royals, denounced him publicly after he was caught smuggling weapons from Yemen.
This only seemed to make him more zealous. He sent an open letter to King Fahd outlining the sins of the Saudi government and calling for a campaign of guerrilla attacks to drive Americans from Saudi Arabia. Three months later, in November of 1995, a truck bomb exploded at a Saudi National Guard training center operated by the United States in Riyadh, killing seven people. That year, Belgian investigators found a kind of how-to manual for terrorists on a CD. The preface dedicated it to Bin Laden, the hero of the holy war.
The next May, when the men accused of the Riyadh bombing were beheaded in Riyadh’s main square, they were forced to read a confession in which they acknowledged the connection to Bin Laden. The next month, June of 1996, a truck bomb destroyed Khobar Towers, an American military residence in Dhahran. It killed nineteen soldiers.
Bin Laden fled to Afghanistan that summer, after the Sudan expelled him under pressure from the Americans and Saudis, and forged an alliance with Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban. In August of 1996, from the Afghan mountain stronghold of Tora Bora, Bin Laden issued his Declaration of War Against the Americans Who Occupy the Land of the Two Holy Mosques. “Muslims burn with anger at America,” it read.The presence of American forces in the Persian Gulf states “will provoke the people of the country and induces aggression on their religion, feelings, and prides and pushes them to take up armed struggle against the invaders occupying the land.”
The imbalance of power between American forces and Muslim forces demanded a new kind of fighting, he wrote, “in other words, to initiate a guerrilla war, where sons of the nation, not the military forces, take part in it.”
That same month, in New York City, a federal grand jury began meeting to consider charges against Bin Laden. Disputes arose among prosecutors and American law enforcement and intelligence officers about which attacks against American interests could truly be attributed to Bin Laden; whether in fact he had, as an indictment eventually charged, trained and paid the men who killed the Americans in Somalia.
His foot soldiers, in testimony, offered differing pictures of Bin Laden’s actual involvement. In some cases he could be as aloof as any boss with thousands of employees. Yet one of the men convicted of the bombings of the embassies said that Bin Laden had been so involved that he was the one who had pointed at surveillance photographs to direct where the truck bomb should be driven.
Bin Laden was becoming more emboldened, summoning Western reporters to his hide-outs in Afghanistan to relay his message: he would wage war against the United States and its allies if Washington did not remove its troops from the Gulf region.
“So we tell the Americans as a people,” he told ABC News, “and we tell the mothers of soldiers and American mothers in general that, if they value their lives and the lives of their children, to find a nationalistic government that will look after their interests and not the interests of the Jews. The continuation of tyranny will bring the fight to America, as Ramzi Yousef and others did. This is my message to the American people: to look for a serious government that looks out for their interests and does not attack others, their lands, or their honor.”
In February of 1998, he issued the edict calling for attacks on Americans anywhere in the world, declaring it an “individual duty” for all Muslims.
In June, the grand jury convened two years earlier issued its indictment, charging Bin Laden with conspiracy to attack the United States abroad, for heading al-Qaeda and for financing terrorist activities around the world.
On 7 August, the eighth anniversary of the United States’ order sending troops into the Gulf region, two bombs exploded simultaneously at the American Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The Nairobi bomb killed 213 people and wounded 4,500; the bomb in Dar es Salaam killed 11 and wounded 85.
The United States retaliated two weeks later, with strikes against what were thought to be terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, which officials contended, erroneously, it turned out, was producing chemical weapons for al-Qaeda.
Bin Laden had trapped the United States in an escalating spiral of tension, where any defensive or retaliatory actions would affirm the evils he said had provoked the attacks in the first place. In an interview with Time magazine that December, he brushed aside President Clinton’s threats against him, and referred to himself in the third person, as if recognizing or encouraging the notion that he had become larger than life. “To call us Enemy Number One or Enemy Number Two does not hurt us,” he said. “Osama bin Laden is confident that the Islamic nation will carry out its duty.”
In January of 1999, the United States government issued a superseding indictment that affirmed the power Bin Laden had sought all along, declaring al-Qaeda an international terrorist organization in a conspiracy to kill American citizens.
After the attacks of 11 September, Bin Laden did what had become routine: he took to Arab television. He appeared, in his statement to the world, to be at the top of his powers. President Bush had declared that the nations of the world were either with the Americans or against them on terrorism; Bin Laden held up a mirror image, declaring the world divided between infidels and believers.
Bin Laden had never before claimed or accepted responsibility for terrorist attacks. In a videotape found in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar weeks after the attacks, he firmly took responsibility for, and reveled in, the horror of 11 September: “We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower,” he said. “We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all.”
In the videotape, showing him talking to followers nearly two months after the attacks, Bin Laden smiles, hungers to hear more approval and notes proudly that the attacks let loose a surge of interest in Islam around the world. He explained that the hijackers on the planes, “the brothers who conducted the operation”, did not know what the mission would be until just before they boarded the planes. They knew only that they were going to the United States on a martyrdom mission.
Bin Laden had long eluded the allied forces in pursuit of him, moving, it was said, under cover of night with his wives and children, apparently between mountain caves. Yet he was determined that if he had to die, he, too, would die a martyr’s death. His greatest hope, he told supporters, was that if he died at the hands of the Americans, the Muslim world would rise up and defeat the nation that had killed him.

Rico says it will be interesting to see what the reaction is, now that he's dead...

Captured? Just long enough to pull the trigger...

Rico says Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper have an article in The New York Times about the way the military found Osama bin Laden:

After years of dead ends and promising leads gone cold, the big break came last August. A trusted courier of Osama bin Laden, whom American spies had been hunting for years, was finally located in a compound north of the Pakistani capital, close to one of the hubs of American counterterrorism operations. The property was so secure, so large, that American officials guessed it was built to hide someone far more important than a mere courier.
What followed was eight months of painstaking intelligence work, culminating in a helicopter assault by American military and intelligence operatives that ended in the death of Bin Laden, concluding one of history’s most extensive and frustrating manhunts.
American officials said that Bin Laden was shot in the head after he tried to resist the assault force, and that one of his sons died with him.
For nearly a decade, American military and intelligence forces had chased the specter of Bin Laden through Pakistan and Afghanistan, once coming agonizingly close and losing him in a pitched battle at Tora Bora, in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. As Obama administration officials described it, the real breakthrough came when they finally figured out the name and location of Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, whom the al-Qaeda chief appeared to rely on to maintain contacts with the outside world.
Detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier’s pseudonym to American interrogators and said that the man was a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the 11 September attacks.
American intelligence officials said that they finally learned the courier’s real name four years ago, but that it took another two years for them to learn the general region where he operated. Still, it was not until August that they tracked him to the compound in Abbottabad, a medium-sized city about an hour’s drive north of Islamabad, the capital.
CIA analysts spent the next several weeks examining satellite photos and intelligence reports to determine who might be living at the compound, and a senior administration official said that, by September, the CIA had determined there was a “strong possibility” that Bin Laden himself was hiding there.
It was hardly the spartan cave in the mountains where many had envisioned Bin Laden to be hiding. Rather, it was a mansion on the outskirts of the town’s center, set on an imposing hilltop and ringed by twelve-foot-high concrete walls topped with barbed wire.
The property was valued at $1 million, but it had neither a telephone nor an Internet connection. Its residents were so concerned about security that they burned their trash rather putting it on the street for collection like their neighbors.
American officials believed that the compound, built in 2005, was designed for the specific purpose of hiding Bin Laden. Months more of intelligence work would follow before American spies felt highly confident that it was indeed Bin Laden and his family who were hiding in there, and before President Obama determined that the intelligence was solid enough to begin planning a mission to go after the Qaeda leader.
On 14 March, Mr. Obama held the first of what would be five national security meetings in the course of the next six weeks to go over plans for the operation. The meetings, attended only by the president’s closest national security aides, took place as other White House officials scrambled to avert a possible government shutdown over the budget. Four more similar meetings to discuss the plan would follow, until President Obama gathered his aides one final time last Friday. At 8:20 that morning, Mr. Obama met with Thomas Donilon, the national security adviser; John O. Brennan, the counterterrorism adviser; and other senior aides in the Diplomatic Room at the White House. The president was traveling to Alabama later that morning to witness the damage from last week’s tornadoes. But first he had to sign off on the final plan to send intelligence operatives into the compound where the administration believed that Bin Laden was hiding. Even after the president signed the formal orders authorizing the raid, Mr. Obama chose to keep Pakistan’s government in the dark about the operation. “We shared our intelligence on this compound with no other country, including Pakistan,” a senior administration official said.
It is no surprise that the administration chose not to tell Pakistani officials. Even though the Pakistanis had insisted that Bin Laden was not in their country, the United States never really believed it. American diplomatic cables in recent years show constant American pressure on Pakistan to help find and kill Bin Laden.
Asked about the al-Qaeda leader’s whereabouts during a Congressional visit to Islamabad in September 2009, the Pakistani interior minister, Rehman Malik, replied that he “’had no clue”, but added that he did not believe that Bin Laden was in the area. Bin Laden had sent his family to Iran, so it made sense that he might have gone there himself, Mr. Malik argued. Alternatively, he might be hiding in Saudi Arabia or Yemen, or perhaps he was already dead, he added, according to a cable from the American Embassy that is among the collection obtained by WikiLeaks.
The mutual suspicions have grown worse in recent months, particularly after Raymond Davis, a CIA officer, shot two men on a crowded street in Lahore in January.
On Sunday, the small team of American military and intelligence operatives poured out of helicopters for their attack on the heavily fortified compound. American officials gave few details about the raid itself, other than to say that a firefight broke out shortly after the commandos arrived, and that Bin Laden had tried to “resist the assault force”.
When the shooting stopped, Bin Laden and three other men lay dead. One woman, whom an American official said had been used as a human shield by one of the Qaeda operatives, was also killed. The Americans collected Bin Laden’s body and loaded it onto one of the remaining helicopters, and the assault force hastily left the scene. Obama administration officials said that one of helicopters went down during the mission because of mechanical failure, but that no Americans were injured.
It was 3:50 on Sunday afternoon when President Obama received the news that Bin Laden had tentatively been identified, most likely after a series of DNA tests. The al-Qaeda leader’s body was flown to Afghanistan, the country where he made his fame fighting and killing Soviet troops during the 1980s. From there, American officials said, the body was buried at sea.

Rico says it'll be a great movie (after someone on the inside writes the book, of course), but they left out just one little bit: if they buried him at sea (good idea), the nearest ocean to Afghanistan is a long way away:

Blow that sucker!

Malcolm Gay has an article in The New York Times about plans to open a levee in Missouri:

As a huge storm settled over southeastern Missouri, the Army Corps of Engineers began the task of filling an 11,000-foot system of buried pipes with an explosive material to blow a two-mile-long gap in the Birds Point levee. The breach would inundate about 130,000 acres of farmland, to relieve pressure on the overburdened system of levees to the north.
“We’ve been told to go, but we’ve got two more cells of lightning that need to move through here before we start to pump,” Jim Lloyd, the corps’ operations team leader, said as he walked through the wind and rain. “We’re going to work through the night to get this loaded.” Mr. Lloyd, who had just left a briefing, emphasized that although Major Genera; Michael J. Walsh, who commands the Mississippi Valley Division of the Corps, had ordered that the explosives be loaded, he had yet to give the final word to blast the levee. “He’ll still have to make the decision,” Mr. Lloyd said, adding that although the explosives were extremely stable and would not be primed, the lightning was “going to complicate our lives something fierce.”
Earlier in the day, Missouri officials made a last-ditch effort to spare the levee when the state’s attorney general turned to the United States Supreme Court, asking it to overturn a day-old order from the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit that had allowed the Corps to proceed with the operation. The state was later denied.
But, even as the legal fight played out, General Walsh was directing the two barges stationed at a nearby staging area to prepare to move into the final position from which crews could begin injecting the levees with 265 tons of explosives to blast the earthen structure.
“It will be a heaving of soil; the levee will be excavated very rapidly,” said Nick Boone, a mechanical engineer who leads the corps’ blasting team. “On this upper end, it’s going to look like a waterfall. It’s an instant removal, and that’s the whole point: instant relief of the entire system.”
Blowing the levee will serve as a fiery coda to an agonizing round of deliberations that has played out here over the past several days, as General Walsh has weighed the interests of about two hundred people living in the floodway against the safety of Cairo, Illinois, a struggling town of around three thousand people that lies on a winnowed slip of land between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The move is expected to drop water levels upstream by roughly four feet.
General Walsh has toured the affected region over the past several days, meeting with residents and studying data provided by his team of experts. All the while, the surging rivers have continued to rise. “ ‘Project Flood’ is upon us,” he said in a statement. “It is testing the system like never before.”
The problem is essentially one of drainage. With both rivers running high, they have backed up above the confluence, raising water levels upstream and causing major underseepage in Cairo, weakening the town’s defenses and prompting city officials there to call for a mandatory evacuation. “It’s a no-brainer, the ground’s softening,” said Mayor Judson Childs of Cairo, who on Monday leaves office to be replaced by a new mayor. “This could change from minute to minute.”
Illinois state troopers went door to door rousting residents and patrolling the empty streets. A crew of inmates from the Tamms Correctional Center continued to fill sandbags at the north end of town, and emergency vehicles raced along Washington Avenue. Otherwise, the streets were largely empty as residents appeared to heed the evacuation order, fleeing town in a diminishing stream of cars.
Pulling his truck onto Washington Avenue, Harry Williams said he had evacuated last night but returned to get some medicine for his father-in-law and check on his property. “I was worried about looters,” said Mr. Williams, who is staying with family north of town. “But it looks like they’re patrolling the town a lot better now.”
A few blocks down the road, Sebastian Thomas, lounging in a plastic lawn chair outside a self-service car wash, said the only thing that would make him evacuate was “about six feet of water. I’m going to stay here to help these women and children,” said Mr. Thomas, who said that many of the people squatting in the city’s abandoned buildings might not be aware of the situation. “A lot of these people are drug addicts and don’t know they’ve got options to get out of town, so I’m going to stay here and help.”
The rising water has cast a harsh light on relations in the region, where the interests of Missouri farmers have come into direct conflict with residents of this brutalized town of crumbling buildings, feral dogs, and poverty. Once home to 15,000 people, Cairo was a cultural hub, home to a thriving river trade. In recent years, however, the city has struggled with major population loss, poverty and a deteriorating infrastructure.
But while attention in recent days has focused on the conflict between Cairo and its agricultural neighbors to the south, corps members have repeatedly emphasized that they are concerned about the entire levee system. “What we’re looking at is what are the effects on the overall system,” said Colonel Vernie L. Reichling, the Corps’ commander for the Memphis District, adding, “The floodway was designed not just to protect Cairo, but the entire region.”
First conceived after the Great Flood of 1927, the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project is a system of levees, dams and floodways that protects a 35,000-square-mile stretch of land from Cairo in the north to the river’s Louisiana delta. The levee at Birds Point has been breached only once before, during the flood of 1937, when waters at Cairo reached 59.5 feet. That record was passed Sunday, as waters neared sixty feet, half a foot from their projected crest of 60.5 feet. To complicate matters, the National Weather Service is forecasting continued rains in the region, and corps analysts predict that the record crest could continue for more than five days, placing untold stress on the earthen levee and floodwall defenses that ring Cairo.
During the 1937 flood, engineers used dynamite to blast the earthen retaining wall, lowering the water level at Cairo by roughly three feet.
That figure gave little comfort to Bobby Byrne, who has grown corn, wheat, and soy on his 550-acre spread in the flood zone all his life. “I don’t figure it’s going to do what they think it’s going to do,” said Mr. Byrne, 59, whose family has owned the farmland since the 1800s. “When they blew it in ’37, the river was back up in a day. It didn’t take pressure off anything.?

Real money, too

Rico says he carried a small handful of coins he'd had for years down to the local coin store the other day, and walked out (to his considerable surprise) with over three hundred bucks. Stephanie Clifford has an article in The New York Times on the very subject:

As investors send prices soaring for not only gold, but now also silver, consumers have been unearthing ancient stashes of silverware, teapots, and jewelry from long-discarded lovers, and trading them in at pawn shops or selling them on eBay for cash. More and more cash, in fact, as weeks go by.
“We’re seeing an increase of people coming in from all walks of life because they hear the news: gold prices are at record highs, silver prices are at record highs, so they’re basically grabbing what they have in their home and coming in to pawn, or sell, the items,” said Yigal Adato, an owner of CashCo Pawn in San Diego, California.
The sharp increase in prices (on Friday, gold hit a new high, not adjusted for inflation, while silver in April had the largest monthly jump in 28 years) has had an effect across the spectrum of retailers dealing with precious metals. Plain old silver enjoys new cachet among jewelers moving away from gold. And jewelry designers are opting for cheaper alternatives than metals, like emeralds, in one case.
Even the business of marriage enters in. Bands of gold are getting closer in price to the diamonds that sit on them. And Indian weddings, with traditional displays of celebratory gold, may be less gilded this summer.
Gold has been surging for years, and on Friday, it almost hit $1,570 for a troy ounce (a nominal high, not adjusted for inflation). Silver, measured by futures for July delivery, is almost as high as it has been since 1980, at more than $48 an ounce, though that comparison, too, is not adjusted for inflation. So far this year, the price of silver has risen more than fifty percent.
Gold has been slower to increase, with contracts for future delivery rising about nine percent this year. When gold started its most recent run after the banking crisis in fall 2008, it posted a 25 percent gain for all of 2009.
Pawn shops are benefiting. Three publicly traded pawn shop companies, Cash America, EZCorp, and FirstCash Financial, recently reported sharp increases in net income compared with a year earlier. For Cash America, the rise was fourteen percent; with 34 percent for EZCorp; and 87 percent for FirstCash. Armloads of metal merchandise brought in by customers helped to drive those results: at FirstCash, domestic revenue from wholesale scrap jewelry rose 45 percent.
Worried about inflation, and wanting the stability of precious metals, investors are buying them in coins, and via vehicles like the iShares Silver Trust, an exchange-traded fund backed by silver. “Investors who feel they may have missed the boat with gold have jumped into silver because it has a better price point,” said Suki Cooper, a precious-metals analyst for Barclays Capital. Yet, even if investors think $48 an ounce is reasonable, jewelers say the price has turned once-plebian silver into something extravagant. “I felt you’d never see the day when silver would start to jack up like this,” said Alexis Bittar, who designs jewelry sold at stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom. “It’s always been considered not a base metal, but fairly close to it.” He added, “But, next to gold, it’s the next precious metal in line, and it makes sterling seem more luxurious.” Mr. Bittar, whose jewelry typically sells for a few hundred dollars, said he was making shifts to keep prices flat. Brass, for instance, substitutes as a base for silver on items that will be coated with gold, and he is reducing the amount of metal used in some designs.
J. C. Penney, which is also trying to keep prices flat on most items, began using alternative metals when gold prices started rising, and now sells items made with sterling silver, cobalt, and Platinaire, a mix of silver and platinum, said Rebecca Winter, a Penney spokeswoman. Also, she said, the retailer realized that customers did not mind paying higher prices for trendy pieces. In February, Penney introduced Alexandra Gemstones, a line meant to capitalize on the popularity of colorful accessories, while avoiding silver and gold.
Michael Bisceglia, the president of the jewelry company Stauer, is also emphasizing gemstones; even rubies, he said, can be had at low prices. “Emeralds, rubies, sapphires, tanzanite, pearls, those prices haven’t gone up that much, so I’m adding more gemstones to jewelry now, and less silver,” he said.
As for the Indian weddings, some changes are under consideration. Indian weddings typically involve a lot of gold jewelry, said Anu Duggal, a founder and the executive vice president for new business development for Exclusively.In, a site that sells Indian fashion and jewelry and just introduced a weddings section. “It is very common for not only the bride and groom, but also the family members, to purchase new outfits and jewelry for these events,” Ms. Duggal said in an email. She added, “Gold itself is the most common gift given during weddings, and it is customary for the bride to wear pure gold as part of the formal wedding ceremony.” But as the cost of gold has shot up, brides are altering the tradition, shifting to semi-precious and gold-plated jewelry, Ms. Duggal said. “This is becoming more and more acceptable,” she said.
At CashCo Pawn, the metals rush has brought in lots of silver inventory, like coins, teapots, and flatware. “People receive Tiffany silver items,” Mr. Adato said, “and the girlfriend brings it in to sell; they say: ‘You know what? I broke up with this guy. I don’t want to see this anymore.’” In addition, people are still bringing in scrap gold, he added: “gold teeth, a lot of dental work. We get grills once in a while, gold grills.”
Joe Ellis, the owner of Cherokee Coins in Alpharetta, Georgia, said he had never seen higher demand for gold and silver bars. Customers want coins like the United States silver eagle, generic silver bars, circulated silver dollars, and dimes and quarters from before 1965, when they were made with ninety percent silver. Cherokee accepts pawned items, but, Mr. Ellis said, that business had slowed. During the recession, he accepted a steady stream of items like broken bracelet chains and silverware, but now, he said, his customers seemed to have little left in their attics and basements. “Quite frankly, I think people have just so much they can sell,” he said.

There's an app (boom) for that

Rico says it comes as no surprise to him that the military, full of young men fresh out of high school, is using snappy software to entertain and train them, as Andrew Martin and Thomas Lin note in an article in The New York Times:

Brigadier General Harold J. Greene only has to look around his house to realize the challenges the Army faces in engaging young soldiers. His children, he says, are always “buried in a cellphone or an iPad.” General Greene, a senior official in the Army’s research and development engineering command, is among a cadre of high-ranking officials pushing for the military to embrace technologies that are already popular among consumers, like smartphones, video games, and virtual worlds. The goal is to provide engaging training tools for soldiers who have grown up using sophisticated consumer electronics and are eager to incorporate them into their routine.
At a time of shrinking budgets, these tools are viewed as relatively inexpensive supplements to larger, costlier training equipment while also providing a surprisingly realistic training experience. The military is already using some video games for recruitment and to train soldiers, and it has started experimenting with virtual worlds, as well. The tools are developed specifically for military use.
In addition, the Army recently held a contest for soldiers to determine who could develop the best smartphone app. Among the apps now available on an Army website: bugle calls, body fat calculator, Army creeds, sniper awareness, and capture avoidance. (Most apps are for both the iPhone and Android phones, but some are for just one system.)
“We have to adapt to where they are,” General Greene said, speaking of the need to appeal to young soldiers and teach them in ways, and on devices, they are accustomed to. “This is something we absolutely have to do.”
But efforts to vastly expand the use of virtual games and everyday electronics have run into a slew of obstacles, not the least of which is a military bureaucracy slow to embrace change.
Security concerns about soldiers using wireless devices on the battlefield are one problem, because transmissions have to be encrypted. Another obstacle is the lingering belief among some high-level officials that games, gadgets, and avatars simply have no place in the military.
For now, the budget for video games and smartphones for military training is a relative pittance. For instance, the Army spends roughly $10 million to $20 million a year on licenses, modifications, and development of Army games.
“Budgets are always an issue,” said Frank C. DiGiovanni, director for training readiness and strategy at the Defense Department. “What I’m trying to do is demonstrate these are extremely effective.”
Mr. DiGiovanni made his remarks at GameTech, a five-year-old convention that was held here in Orlando in March. It showcases the military’s expanding use of simulators, video games, virtual worlds, and smartphones.
Besides the video games that allow soldiers to rehearse for combat, vendors were offering devices that provide cultural and language lessons, medical training, and shooting practice.
While GameTech is tiny by convention standards, with just 775 participants and 29 vendors, several participants said they considered it major progress that such an event was being held, given the skepticism military leaders displayed toward video games a decade ago. “When I started with this in ’99, you couldn’t use the word ‘game’,” said James Korris, chief executive of Creative Technologies and a creator of one of the first military video games, Full Spectrum Warrior. “They were training guides, cognitive development tools.” “GameTech?” he added. “Who would have thunk it?”
The military is partly responsible for the growth of the video game industry. For decades, it has created increasingly sophisticated simulators and computer-based war games. Some of the people involved in the creation of those products went on to work for video game manufacturers, taking their expertise with them. Then, as commercial video games became more sophisticated, the military began borrowing ideas from them.
For instance, in the mid-1990s, some Marines tinkered with the popular Doom video game, replacing fantasy weapons with real ones and monsters with soldiers. A few years later, the military collaborated with academia and game developers to create Full Spectrum Warrior, which was designed to mimic combat.
Virtual training will never replace the live training that is still so essential, military officials said. But it allows soldiers to practice many times without the expense of big equipment or the risk of using live ammunition. And the effectiveness of video games has improved drastically, officials said.
An oft-cited example is VBS 2, which was first bought by the Marine Corps in 2001. The game-based simulator, which runs on laptops, was created for the military by two Czech brothers and the leader of an Australian heavy metal band.
While the graphics aren’t as sophisticated as some commercial games, VBS 2 has an open platform that allows soldiers to plug in new details, from a recent mission, say, so that its database of potential situations is constantly growing. In the last fourteen months or so, user input has increased 1,200 percent, officials said. The latest version can import detailed aerial and satellite imagery so Marines can rehearse in virtual 3-D copies of their places of deployment.
“Once they get into combat, they have seen almost every possible scenario,” said Leslie Dubow, project director for Games for Training, the Army’s acquisition program for games. She said the Army bought the licensing rights to VBS 2 for under $10 million.
“You can’t simulate the dust, dirt, heat, and stresses that you inevitably feel in combat situations,” said First Lieutenant Roy Fish, 34, a platoon commander based in Camp Leatherneck, Afghanistan, “but I think the simulation gets as close as you’re ever going to get in North Carolina to Afghanistan.”
Speaking by phone from Afghanistan, Lieutenant Fish, who first trained on VBS 2 in 2008 at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, said the virtual simulator had saved lives in the field. Using the abbreviation for an improvised explosive device, he said: “Every time we go outside the wire and react to an I.E.D. or small-arms fire, it all translates to what we did in the simulator.” When his Marines are done with the simulation training, he said, they are “sweating from head to toe. It’s amazing how realistic it was. It’s literally the same exact terrain.” Lieutenant Fish emphasized that game-based simulators like VBS are not video games like Call of Duty. “We try not to make training fun for Marines,” he said. “If you don’t take it seriously, someone will die.”
Virtual worlds offer some of the same benefits, without the gaming aspects. For instance, virtual worlds could potentially allow instructors in Afghanistan to provide training to young soldiers in the United States, giving them an idea of the landscape and even introducing them to local officials, said Jeff Mills, project coordinator for virtual worlds at Katmai, a military contractor. Mr. Mills said a virtual world could also be used to instruct mechanics back home on how to fix airplanes or tanks. While he is optimistic, he said the military had a long way to go before virtual worlds were routinely used in training. “We really have a poor track record at the moment of taking advantage of this,” he said.
The military has also been slow to embrace smartphones, but they have a number of high-ranking advocates, including Lieutenant General Michael Vane, from the Army’s training command. He said current training for soldiers often involved sitting in a classroom for 45 minutes watching a PowerPoint presentation. Smartphones, he said, would provide “content to a soldier at the point of need”, meaning that, because soldiers would have the phones with them at all times, they could receive immediately useful information.
In describing the utility of smartphones, officials cite an app recently created for the Army’s Blue Book, which describes basic duties and responsibilities for Army officers. The app took three days to create and relatively little money; a recent printing of the Blue Book took 135 days and $750,000.
The Army recently conducted a pilot project that provided some soldiers with smartphones. Because of security concerns, the phones’ wireless capability was shut off, and soldiers complained that they wanted them to be more interactive.
“We’re not sure how it’s going to go,” said Mike Piercy, a senior management training adviser in the Army’s acquisition arm for simulation, who deals with smartphones. “But it’s going to go.”

Rico says this reminds him (with some regret) of the time, back in the mid-1980s, when, as an Apple employee, he tried to interest the company in a 'military Macintosh'; given the staunch pacifism of Steve Jobs and others in high places at Apple, the notion, of course, went nowhere...

Carrier dyke

Rico says no one should be surprised (though some are, including the former naval person (no, not Churchill; he's dead) who sent him this) that a nice girl makes good, even if it is in the Navy:

No combat tours, yet she will command Carrier Strike Group Two...
Are you really surprised? In a military that places a premium on diversity, quotas,political correctness, rapid 'upward mobility' of minorities, and possession of a generous measure of mediocrity, success is all but guaranteed.
Well, here it is, the first female Carrier Group Admiral. Zero night carrier landings, no strike experience, no combat experience. Was assistant operations officer on the Lexington, which was the sixty-year-old training carrier that sat in Pensacola for its last forty years; its longest cruise was to Texas. No cruiser time. No sub time. Never a CAG. Never the CO of any aircraft carrier.
She was the commander of a logistics group. Was CO of one ship, the Bataan, an LHD with one operation of note: it assisted Katrina victims in New Orleans. She was the EA for the CNO and had 3 other staff tours. Now she is giving speeches as the Commander, Carrier Strike Group Two.
How can the Navy do this?
She is now in charge of the premiere fighting group of the United States Navy with only three years experience in something that may have been part of a Strike Group, if it deployed outside CONUS, which is not mentioned, so it probably did not happen.
Unprecedented. It is hard to understand, other than as political correctness run amok. Here's her bio: 

A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Rear Admiral Nora Tyson graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in English. She attended Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, receiving her commission in the U.S. Navy in December of that year.
Tyson reported for flight training in Pensacola, Florida after serving a brief tour ashore in Washington. She earned her wings as a naval flight officer in 1983.
She served three tours in Fleet Air Reconnaissance Squadron VQ4, at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland and Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, including one as commanding officer. She also commanded the amphibious assault ship USS Bataan, LHD 5, leading the Navy's contributions to disaster relief efforts on the U.S. Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and deploying twice to the Persian Gulf in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Other tours at sea included duty as assistant operations officer aboard the training aircraft carrier, USS Lexington, AVT 16, and as navigator aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. CVN 65.
Ashore, she served as Airborne Communications Officer Course instructor and officer in charge at Naval Air Maintenance Training Detachment 1079, NAS Patuxent River, Maryland. She has also completed tours on the Joint Staff as a political-military planner in the Asia-Pacific Division of the Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate; as executive assistant for the assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; as director of staff for commander, Naval Forces Europe/commander 6th Fleet, and as executive assistant for the chief of naval operations. Her most recent assignment was as commander, Logistics Group, Western Pacific/commander, Task Force 73.
She earned a Master of Arts in National Security and Strategic Affairs from the U.S. Naval War College in 1995.

Another lust object

Rico says he still can't find the spec that shows how long it'll record HD video, but it's sexy enough that Rico wants one, even at $1200...

Despair might be underplaying his response

Lisa Foderaro has an article in The New York Times about a guy who couldn't handle rejection:

In the three weeks since a Spanish instructor at Princeton University killed himself, questions have been raised by students and professors there and on other campuses about the university’s handling of the episode. Princeton officials have said that the instructor, Antonio Calvo, was on leave at the time he died, but declined to provide other details, citing employees’ privacy rights.
Documents obtained by The New York Times, including a letter to Dr. Calvo from Princeton and an entry in his notebook, indicate that the university suspended him on 8 April, four days before his death, while it investigated serious complaints against him, and that the news threw him into despair.
“We have received information from multiple sources that you have been engaging in extremely troubling and inappropriate behavior in the workplace,” the chairman of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, Gabriela Nouzeilles, wrote to Dr. Calvo, a senior lecturer who taught Spanish to undergraduates and supervised graduate students.
The letter did not elaborate on the complaints, but it informed Dr. Calvo that he was suspended with pay, pending an investigation, and barred him from campus, instructing him to leave his Princeton ID and keys on his desk. Because he was in the United States on a temporary work visa, he faced a forced return to his native Spain.
Dr. Calvo’s appointment was up for renewal, and the suspension came in the midst of his evaluation. Marco Aponte-Moreno, a friend and former lecturer in Spanish at Princeton, said a faculty member and a few graduate students had campaigned to block the reappointment.
On 9 April, the day after his suspension, Dr. Calvo made a notebook entry in Spanish that revealed his growing turmoil: “The emotional torture of the months-long wait has become unbearable in my job,” said the entry, which was translated by a friend, Celia Pérez-Ventura, a former director of the Spanish-language program at Princeton. “It is better to leave it here instead of continuing this road toward a greater torture, left exposed as if I were guilty of a crime when in reality the committee refused to see the merit of my work, focusing instead only on the fact that I raised my voice at my subordinates.”
Friends and former colleagues of Dr. Calvo, 45, a popular figure on campus for more than a decade, say he had long had conflicts with graduate students. He oversaw their teaching of undergraduates and criticized some as not working hard enough. The students, in turn, complained that he was overly harsh.
With a loud voice and an occasional temper, Dr. Calvo did not fit the buttoned-down norm of American higher education, his friends said. He may also have felt looser around graduate students, viewing them as colleagues because they also taught.
Friends say the complaints about Dr. Calvo stem from two incidents. In one, they said, Dr. Calvo told a graduate student that she deserved a slap on the face; in the other, he sent an e-mail with a joking reference to a male student’s testicles, using a Spanish expression that exhorts someone to get to work. Dr. Aponte said that because Dr. Calvo was gay, the email was presented as evidence of sexual harassment. “Those are the only two incidents that we know of, and they were completely misinterpreted and taken out of proportion,” Dr. Aponte said. “They should have given him a warning of some kind.”
The letter from Princeton relieved Dr. Calvo of his teaching responsibilities, and told him to expect a call from an associate dean the next Monday to schedule an interview in which he could respond to the allegations. It is unclear whether Dr. Calvo spoke to anyone from Princeton that Monday. But the letter indicates that he was given a chance to defend himself, contrary to assertions by some supporters. The next day, 12 April, he was found dead of slash wounds in his Manhattan apartment.
In a letter to “the Princeton community” last week, the university president, Shirley M. Tilghman, described the process for reviewing faculty appointments, but said the content of Dr. Calvo’s review could not be disclosed without “an unprecedented breach” of confidentiality. She lamented that, as a result, misleading rumors had spread on campus and the Internet. “Most problematically,” she said, “innocent individuals on campus have been identified and fingers pointed in a manner that is deeply unfair, hurtful and unworthy of this university community.”
Twenty-three professors and students at Princeton and other campuses released a letter asking the university to issue a full report on how and why it suspended Dr. Calvo.

A movie Rico wishes he'd done

Rico says that would be Cowboys & Aliens, coming soon to a theater near you.
Starring Harrison Ford (aging, like Rico, only better), the premise is this: a spaceship arrives in Arizona, circa 1873, to take over the Earth, starting with the Wild West. A posse of cowboys are all that stand in their way.

The trailer inspires a mixed response, but Rico will risk eight bucks on it...

Testosterone, redux

Rico says he'd probably see it anyway, but Brooks Barnes has a review in The New York Times of the latest in the Fast and the Furious series:

A maxim of the movie business is that worn-out film franchises cannot be rehabilitated on the side of the road. Once sequel fatigue sets in, they have to be towed into the shop and sold for scrap or fully retooled. That is what should have happened to The Fast and the Furious car-racing series five years ago when a third installment, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, stalled, selling about $62 million in tickets in North America, or fifty percent less than its predecessor. But Universal Pictures didn’t give up, and a souped-up fourth movie, Fast & Furious, showed surprising strength in 2009.
Over the weekend, a new entry, Fast Five, rocked Hollywood by selling almost $84 million in tickets, by far the biggest opening of the year and, if the prayers of movie moguls are answered, signaling the beginning of a box-office turnaround.
'Relieved' is one word Adam Fogelson, Universal’s chairman, used to describe his state of mind on Sunday morning. “We made a lot of very specific and very strategic choices that were not obvious.”
Studios and theater owners urgently need a big summer. Domestic box-office revenue has fallen fourteen percent in 2011, to about $3 billion, compared with the same period a year earlier, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles statistics on ticket sales. Higher prices, particularly for 3-D screenings, have probably kept some people at home. But the likeliest culprit is quality, which many studio executives concede has been lacking in a lot of releases.
The movie industry’s high-stakes summer season traditionally stretches from the first full weekend in May to Labor Day, when studios record about forty percent of their annual box office revenue. With Fast Five, Universal decided to stretch the period, using the marketing slogan “summer starts early”. Ticket sales easily surpassed the record for the weekend, set last year by A Nightmare on Elm Street, which took in $33 million.
Fast Five is an unusual sequel because of Universal’s fix-on-the-fly approach, but it is as good a marker as any of what the movie capital is counting on in the months ahead: sequels and more sequels. There are ten this time around, including Fast Five, more than there have been in any summer in recent memory.
“They’re stacked one after another after another, which will help give the marketplace momentum,” said Phil Contrino, editor of BoxOffice.com.Of these films, one in particular is expected to be a multiplex monster: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 from Warner Brothers. It is the first Potter film to be released in 3-D and finishes out the series.
Expectations are also high for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Walt Disney Studios), Kung Fu Panda 2 (DreamWorks Animation) and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Paramount Pictures). Pixar’s Cars 2 doesn’t open until 24 June. but has already broken one record: the biggest array of related retail merchandise, beating Star Wars.
Hollywood is taking some enormous risks in the coming stretch. One of the biggest gambles is Green Lantern, a space opera that Warner hopes will put to rest criticisms about the degree to which it has mined its DC Comics library for movie characters. Early buzz has been mixed, with questions about the visual effects and the skin-tight costume and mask worn by its star, Ryan Reynolds.
“There is also the worry of superhero fatigue,” Mr. Contrino said, noting that Green Lantern will arrive after Marvel’s Thor and 20th Century Fox’s much-anticipated X-Men: First Class.
Another question mark is Cowboys & Aliens, an expensive genre mash-up starring an aging Harrison Ford. It’s an alien movie set in the Old West, and some industry experts fear it could fall flat. On the positive side, the companies behind this picture, DreamWorks Studios and Universal, recently released new marketing materials to positive response.
Nobody needs hits more than Universal, which, despite a few bright spots like Hop, was recently labeled “a bomb factory” by the entertainment news site Deadline.com. The studio has a new corporate parent, Comcast, which is watching to determine whether management changes are needed.
The Fast and the Furious franchise, which made its debut in 2001 as a counterculture car movie, underscores how hard Universal executives are trying.
Set in crime-ridden Los Angeles neighborhoods, the first film starred Vin Diesel as a ruthless street racer and hijacker. That movie, and its 2003 sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious, were hits, generating a combined $440 million in global ticket sales. Then came the disappointing Tokyo Drift.
Universal thought about calling it a day. Taking encouragement from continued support for the series from Hispanic and African-American moviegoers, however, it brought back Mr. Diesel for a fourth movie (he had moved on after the first), and the result, Fast & Furious, was surprisingly strong: $353 million in global sales. But the studio still worried about sustainability. “We knew that we needed to try and grow the franchise, but that a certain group of people were never going to consider it because they dismissed it as a car movie,” Mr. Fogelson said.
So, together with the longtime producer of the franchise, Neal Moritz, executives made more changes. Fast Five was given a new antagonist, played by Dwayne Johnson, aka the Rock, and an international backdrop, Rio de Janeiro. Most notably, Universal changed the genre of the movie, making it a heist film along the lines of Ocean’s 11.
“It was definitely a high-wire act,” said Donna Langley, Universal’s co-chairwoman, of the genre shift. “You can’t alienate the core audience, and shifting the entire paradigm of an ongoing franchise is slightly uncharted territory.” Universal also took risks with the storyline, treating the series like a telenovela that takes absurd turns, including a character coming back from the dead. Universal and Mr. Moritz bet heavily on one ingredient: old-fashioned action sequences, the kind not reliant on computer-generated visual effects. “It turned out to be a competitive advantage,” Mr. Moritz said. “It allows us to stand out.”
The movie’s opening tally in North America was the biggest of any installment in the series. Overseas, where Fast Five has taken in an additional $81.4 million, sales are significantly outpacing those for the franchise’s fourth chapter. Universal said Fast Five cost $125 million after taking tax incentives and other financial credits into account.
Citing the warm critical reception for Fast Five, Mr. Moritz said he had hopes for the film’s continued success in the weeks ahead. About eighty percent of the reviews for Fast Five were positive, according to RottenTomatoes.com, which aggregates reviewer opinions. “For a summer action movie to get those kind of reviews,” Mr. Moritz said. “Wow.”

Rico says he'll do his part, but he ain't seeing all these movies.
Definitely:Pirates of the Caribbean, Cowboys & Aliens (and why didn't Rico write that one?)


Probably:  Fast Five, and a new version of The Three Musketeers that Rico knows nothing about:

No fucking way: Harry Potter, Cars, Kung Fu Panda, Transformers, Green Lantern, or X-Men

Not just yet

Rico says that NPR's extensive coverage of the military strike on Osama bin Laden, in the midst of their scheduled pledge drive, brings to mind the old adage about peace being defined as when public radio gets all the money it needs, but the military has to have a bake sale. (To finally get bin Laden, however, all the money they want...)

History for the day

On 2 May 1945, the then-Soviet Union announced the fall of Berlin and the Allies announced the surrender of Nazi troops in Italy and parts of Austria.

Don't all cheer at once, now

Rico says he went to bed before the announcement, but is pleased with the outcome:

They're both right

There is a famous anecdote about a conversation that F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway had, in which Fitzgerald purportedly said to Hemingway: "The rich are different from you and me." To which Hemingway ostensibly replied: "Yes, they have more money."

Rico says he and his friend Alan discovered the truth of this at the Bay Bridge Boat Show, where they sat on a really ugly boat (which Alan refers to as 'running shoes' because of their profile) that cost nearly $800,000...

History for the day

On 1 May 1960, the then-Soviet Union shot down an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft near Sverdlovsk and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers. (Powers was discharged from the Air Force in 1956 with the rank of captain. He then joined the CIA's U-2 program. U-2 pilots flew espionage missions using an aircraft that could reach altitudes above 70,000 feet, making it invulnerable to Soviet anti-aircraft weapons of the time. The U-2 was equipped with a state-of-the-art camera designed to take high-resolution photos from the edge of the stratosphere over hostile countries, including the Soviet Union. U-2 missions systematically photographed military installations and other important sites.)