Osama Bin Laden

SATISFACTION in the course of justice is taken from the sentencing of four disciples of Osama bin Laden to life in prison for roles in the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Last week, in a lower Manhattan courtroom not far from the former World Trade Center, federal District Judge Leonard Sand also ordered each to pay $33 million in damages to victims' families and the U.S. government, expressing hope of extracting it from al-Qaida accounts. The four were caught in an international dragnet, and convicted of conspiracy with bin Laden to kill Americans.

Former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has been elected to the House (or at least that's where we hear he's going). Welcome to your trends report for Monday, May 8, 2013. Sanford will head to Capitol Hill after facing off against Elizabeth Colbert Busch, sister of the late-night satirist Stephen Colbert. Republicans will hold 233 of the House's 435 seats when Sanford is sworn in, probably this week. Another trip to the House comes today, when former diplomat Gregory Hicks is scheduled to testify about the Benghazi attacks last year.

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon shaved off Osama bin Laden's beard and added a moustache. It took off the camouflage and put him in a cheap suit. It plucked him from the caves and turned his scowl into a grin. And the end result was this: Osama bin Laden, prom date. In a computer-altered image of bin Laden airdropped over Afghanistan, bin Laden looks less like the world's most-wanted man and more like the high-school senior who hopes his palms aren't too sweaty. He brings to mind a disco king a la Saturday Night Fever or a Vegas lounge lizard, not a terrorist whose capture carries a $25 million reward.

"Zero Dark Thirty," the film about the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden, got a fresh infusion of buzz over the weekend when outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta confirmed again that enhanced interrogation techniques aided the effort to find bin Laden. "Some of it came from ... interrogation tactics that were used," he said. "But the fact is, we put together most of that intelligence without having to resort to that. I think we could have gotten bin Laden without that. " In other words, the movie exaggerates the role played by enhanced interrogation techniques -- torture to some -- but they did have a role in the hunt for bin Laden.

MERERANI, Tanzania - The young miners here are known as wanapollo, Swahili for spacemen. Several times a day, they emerge from half a mile below the earth, their bodies coated in glittering graphite dust. They are searching for tanzanite, a gem found only under a 5-square-mile patch of scrub near the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. A few months ago, Mohammed Abubakar supported his mother and eight siblings with money earned from mining the blue-violet stone. But since Sept. 11, reports that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network controlled a chunk of the tanzanite trade have sent the price of the gemstone down about 70 percent, slashing his earnings.

As a charity fund-raiser, a Riviera Beach, Fla., gun dealer is selling $10 posters of Osama bin Laden suitable for the firing range, the concentric target rings rippling from a forehead bull's-eye promising if not victory, at least emotional outlet. The renegade multimillionaire's bearded, turbaned head stares lately from T-shirts, "WANTED" posters, television and computer screens; a party supply store in McAllen, Texas, proffers "Osama Pinatas" for sale and evisceration. Simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, bin Laden is the latest in a series of villains to have his moment in American preoccupation.

second in command to Osama bin Laden, calling for a holy war against "tyrannical Western civilization and its leader, America." It is a jihad [holy war] for the sake of God and will last until [our] religion prevails ... from Spain to Iraq." Ayman al-Zawahri

At long last, Osama bin Laden is gone. I'll never forget the horror of September 11th, and I am relieved this monster of terrorism has been dispatched. It was about time. Now that our mission has been accomplished, it's time to bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and get the Maryland National Guard out of Egypt. America's Middle East adventures should be scaled back and ended. After nearly a decade of war, the loss of thousands of lives and trillions of American tax dollars, I say enough.

Just for the record, President Obama is a bit hypocritical too regarding the killing of Osama bin Laden in that it was the CIA under President Bush that, by using enhanced interrogation techniques, first got the information leading to the discovery of his hideout. President Obama won't use those interrogation techniques; he just kills the same type terrorists with drones. But that is apparently OK. Lyle Rescott, Marriottsville

You may be hoping that Morgan (Super Size Me) Spurlock's Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? slipped into theaters without fanfare because Spurlock did find bin Laden (or at least got close to him) and had to keep it all hush-hush. No such luck. This movie is a case of arthouse bait and switch. Its true subject is one decent Yank's desire to believe that Everyman and Everywoman - Everywhere! - are as warm and amiable as your average American Joe: him, Morgan Spurlock, the regular guy as fearless globetrotter.

The CIA is probably smug and triumphant about its duplicitous vaccination drive in Abbotabad, a mission hatched to catch and kill Osama bin Laden ("A tainted polio program," Jan. 7). As a doctor, I cringe to think of this unscrupulous use of medicine for murder. While the London Guardian investigated the matter and revealed its unethical intricacies, it is amazing that not one American newspaper thought the CIA's vaccination plot was worthy of further scrutiny. The vaccination drive was against Hepatitis B, a deadly and common disease in the Third World, spread by contaminated needles, surgical instruments and tainted blood.

Letter writer Ilene O'Connell says the re-election of Barack Obama as president has made her "ashamed of my country" ("Ashamed of the country that re-elected Obama," Nov. 8). She is entitled to her opinion but not to create her own facts to support it. The fact is that the president - any president - has very little control over the price of gasoline. That's in the hands of the oil-rich nations and the big oil companies, who of course adjust the availability of supplies to make the most money.

There is no TV genre more problematic than docudrama. And Sunday's premiere of "SEAL Team Six," which claims to be the true, inside story of the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, is as problematic as they come. The core issues all grow from the docudramatist's desire to have it both ways in mixing fact and fiction. The goal is to have the credibility of the documentary as well as the poetic license to invent and collapse facts and details in the name of the most compelling storytelling.

Letter writer Bud Gibbs ("Romney is more qualified to be president than Obama," Sept. 4) contends that Mitt Romney is better due to a better resume. That is just a wee bit silly. If Mr. Gibbs would have been around, he surely would have voted for Thomas Dewey over Harry Truman. After all, Mr. Dewey was governor of New York, a successful businessman, and graduated form the finest schools. President Truman was just an unsuccessful haberdasher. However, Mr. Truman went on to become possibly one of the top 10 U.S. Presidents in history.

In response to a recent letter-writer claiming that the Navy SEALs, rather than President Obama, deserve the credit for killing Osama bin Laden, there are few sadder things than watching Republicans try to play down the facts ("SEALs, not Obama, deserve credit for bin Laden death," May 9). Here are the facts: President Obama is commander-in-chief whether his opponents like it or not. He was the one - and the only one - responsible for ordering those SEALs into action. They did not make that decision on their own. He was the one in charge.

After all the publicity and with President Barack Obama posturing about the key role that he played in the demise of Osama bin Laden, it was gratifying to see an op-ed describing the real heroes of the operation ("Bin Laden victory lap went too far," May 6). With the crack outfit of Navy SEALs leading a very dangerous operation, the U.S., and not President Obama, was able to bring to justice one of the perpetrators of9/11. The battle against al-Qaidahas not been won by this single victory, as witnessed by events in Yemen, Iraq and Pakistan.

In response to a recent letter-writer claiming that the Navy SEALs, rather than President Obama, deserve the credit for killing Osama bin Laden, there are few sadder things than watching Republicans try to play down the facts ("SEALs, not Obama, deserve credit for bin Laden death," May 9). Here are the facts: President Obama is commander-in-chief whether his opponents like it or not. He was the one - and the only one - responsible for ordering those SEALs into action. They did not make that decision on their own. He was the one in charge.

BOSTON -- Osama bin Laden's millions might or might not have helped pay for last week's terrorist attacks. But there have long been signs, seemingly benign, of his family's wealth in the Boston area. One relative of the suspected Saudi terrorist owns four condominiums on the waterfront in the city's Charlestown section, according to records. The Flagship Wharf condos, which sell for $500,000 and up, have sweeping views of Boston Harbor, the downtown skyline and Logan International Airport.

Just for the record, President Obama is a bit hypocritical too regarding the killing of Osama bin Laden in that it was the CIA under President Bush that, by using enhanced interrogation techniques, first got the information leading to the discovery of his hideout. President Obama won't use those interrogation techniques; he just kills the same type terrorists with drones. But that is apparently OK. Lyle Rescott, Marriottsville

There has been a lot of discussion about President Obama's highlighting or even bragging about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and its results ("Bin Laden volatile campaign subject," May 1). Much of this discussion has been criticism by Republicans, proving once again that the one area where Republicans are remarkably consistent is in their hypocrisy. They don't seem to remember cheering for a certain former president strutting about in a flight suit on the deck of an aircraft carrier celebrating "Mission Accomplished!"