Updated 3:02 p.m. A major question lingers unanswered at the center of this story: Why was bin Laden killed? Michael Scherer has reported that the Navy Seals who landed at Osama bin Laden’s safehouse were not given orders specifically to kill, but were on a “kill or capture” mission. That implies they were prepared to [...]
In his first interview since commanding the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, CIA chief Leon Panetta tells TIME that U.S. officials feared that Pakistan could have undermined the operation by leaking word to its targets. Long before Panetta ordered Vice Admiral William McRaven, head of the Joint Special Forces Command, to undertake the mission [...]
White House backs off claims bin Laden was armed, used human shield. The operation, blow by blow. Obama mulls releasing photo of bin Laden’s body. Did the U.S. really need closure or comfort in his death?
Shortly after hearing confirmation on Sunday that Osama bin Laden was dead, President Barack Obama walked down to chief of staff Bill Daley’s West Wing office to discuss what he would say in his address to the nation. The President had already mapped it out, even if his speechwriter had yet to start typing. The [...]
U.S. intelligence officials estimate that Osama bin Laden had been living in the $1 million Abbottabad compound where he was killed for up to six years, according to Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein. “That’s what we estimate at this stage,” Feinstein told TIME. Bin Laden “could have been there for five or six years.”
With the fate of Osama bin Laden now firmly sealed, a crucial new question has emerged: Can America’s long-fraught relationship with the country in which the al-Qaeda leader was hiding survive much longer? For nearly a decade, America has danced a strange tango with Pakistan, our nuclear-armed Islamic ally on Afghanistan’s eastern border. The two [...]
I have an unhealthy obsession with the ecologically destructive boondoggles of the Army Corps of Engineers, the dysfunctional water resources agency that drowned New Orleans. And one of the most ludicrous Corps projects is located in Missouri’s soggy southeastern bootheel, right where the agency dynamited a Mississippi River levee Monday that will flood 130,000 acres of farmland. [...]
About half way through his farewell speech on the Senate floor Monday afternoon, Senator John Ensign’s words turned personal. Though it likely made his colleagues wince, the Nevada Republican’s address was a rare moment of raw honesty on the Hill. Ensign, once a rumored candidate for President, will leave the Senate on Tuesday shamed by [...]
The people who gathered Sunday in the Situation Room know all about high-pressure situations. But this was something else. For 40 minutes, the President and his senior aides could do nothing but watch the video screens and listen to the operation and ensuing firefight on the other side of the world. At Barack Obama’s orders, [...]
Omar Waraich explores bin Laden’s last haunt: The home where Bin Laden had been hiding since at least last summer is located in the Bilal Town neighborhood of Abbottabad. It is less than a kilometer away from Pakistan’s Military Academy at Kakul — the country’s equivalent of West Point Academy. “It’s a respectable middle class [...]
