NASA rover Spirit 'revolutionized' how we see Mars
NASA's Mars rover Spirit, shown in an artist's rendering, was expected to serve a three-month mission, but it provided scientists with a trove of information over more than six years of operation. (Reuters)
By Thomas H. Maugh II and Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Time

It was supposed to roam the surface of Mars for only three months and cover a distance of just a few hundred yards. Instead, NASA's Spirit rover traveled nearly five miles over five years, finding geological evidence that the Red Planet had once been warm and wet enough to have harbored life. Even after it got hopelessly stuck in the powdery soil of Gusev crater, the rover continued to make discoveries and beamed them to scientists millions of miles away.

But engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge sent their final commands to Spirit early Wednesday morning, more than a year after the rover made its last transmission to Earth.

After seven years on Mars, the craft had exhausted its batteries, and its electronic innards had probably been destroyed during the long Martian winter, with temperatures sinking to about 150 degrees below zero.

"It's very sad," said Diana Blaney, a geologist and spectroscopist who has been examining the pictures sent by Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, since they arrived on Mars. "I honestly thought up until March that Spirit was going to pull through."

Opportunity continues to soldier on on the opposite side of the planet.

Scientists at JPL mourned the loss of Spirit because they, like many people around the world, had come to think of the two explorers almost as living beings, said John Callas, project manager for the rovers. But they also celebrated its achievements.

"It's impossible to think about Mars before the rovers — they've so revolutionized our understanding of this planet," Callas said. "The Red Planet is no longer this distant alien world. It's now a familiar place, and Spirit has given us that."

The launch of the two rovers in 2003 came at a difficult time for planetary exploration in general and for JPL in particular. The lab's previous two Mars missions, the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander, had both failed in 1999. The loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, which disintegrated as it plunged into the atmosphere, was particularly embarrassing because a contractor had programmed it in English units of measurement rather than the required metric units.

Britain's Beagle 2 lander, scheduled to land Christmas Eve 2003, disappeared without a trace during its descent. That same month, Japan aborted the mission of its Nozomi Mars orbiter because of problems with its navigation system and other equipment.

A lot of hopes were therefore riding on Spirit when it made its fiery descent through the thin Martian atmosphere on Jan. 3, 2004. When the JPL team acquired a signal from the craft at 8:51 that evening, then-NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe proclaimed, "We're back. This is a big night for NASA."

Planning for the Mars Exploration Rovers had begun more than a decade earlier. JPL's initial idea was to investigate what the planet's geology had been like about 3.5 billion to 4 billion years ago, when life was beginning to develop on Earth. A crucial part of the proposal was to make two rovers and deploy in different places.

"The cost is not twice as much as one because a lot of the expense is in the design and validation," Callas said. "You get twice the bang at less than twice the cost."

The initial price tag for the twin-rover mission was $820 million.

Spirit and Opportunity were equipped with a variety of onboard instruments to study rocks on Mars.

Each rover has "eyes" — sharp color cameras that capture images for scientists to study (as well as navigation imagers that help it avoid hazards while driving from place to place). They each have a robotic arm that contains a microscopic imager that is the equivalent of a geologist's hand lens, a rock abrasion tool to help see material just beneath the surface, and spectrometers to examine the composition of the Martian surface.

"Spirit and Opportunity are basically geological explorers," said Ray Arvidson, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis who serves as deputy principal investigator for the rovers' scientific payload.

At 384 pounds apiece, each was more than 15 times the weight of Sojourner, the toy-like rover that had been carried to Mars' surface by the Pathfinder mission in 1997. That required a completely new way of doing things.

Seven months into its journey, Spirit entered the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 mph. Thus began a complex descent-and-entry sequence Callas described as "six minutes of terror."

After friction slowed its descent to less than 1,000 mph in just a few minutes, the lander deployed a parachute and reduced its speed to 200 mph. Just before the lander reached the surface, retro rockets slowed it almost to a stop. Seventeen-foot-high airbags inflated and the craft bounced to a halt in massive Gusev crater.

Within hours, Spirit unfolded its panoramic cameras and sent back the first of thousands of images of the Martian surface. On the third day of the mission, Spirit beamed back three-dimensional panoramic images of Gusev, and scientists and reporters donned tacky paper glasses — red in one eye and blue in the other — to observe the spectacular views.

The mission immediately was hit with a scientific curveball. Extensive imaging from orbit had suggested that Gusev had sedimentary rock layers, which would allow the craft to search for evidence of water early in Martian history. But when Spirit landed, researchers discovered that it was really a volcanic plain, relatively uninteresting.

It was only when the craft began making its way to the nearby Columbia Hills that it began to make crucial finds about Mars' potential for harboring life.

With Spirit, lemons always seemed to turn into lemonade. The first of its six wheels broke in 2006, forcing rover pilots to drive the vehicle backward. By dragging the inoperable wheel, Spirit uncovered a kind of rock called amorphous silica. That provided evidence of previous hydrothermal activity, perhaps hot springs like those at Yellowstone National Park or cracks in the Martian crust called fumaroles that once released acidic steam. On Earth, both hot springs and fumaroles are teeming with organisms.

"It's a big deal because not only do you have water, you have an energy source that could drive an ecosystem," Callas said. "It made its biggest discovery because of a setback."

In early 2009, as Spirit was driving toward a pair of volcanic features in the southern hemisphere named Von Braun and Goddard, its wheels broke through the thin crust and sank into powdery sand. A second wheel became immobilized, and efforts to extricate it simply dug it in deeper.

But the craft had plowed so deeply that it found ferric sulfate, calcium sulfate and silica, which could be evidence that snow or ice had been there in the fairly recent past. Scientists were surprised to find evidence of water in Mars' past so close to the equator instead of just at the poles.

In January 2010, NASA officially gave up trying to dig Spirit out, and the explorer became an immobile scientific observatory. Researchers had hoped to use radio signals from the craft to track the planet's wobble in orbit, which might reveal whether Mars had a liquid or a solid core. But the Martian winter was fast approaching, and the craft went into hibernation mode because there was not enough sunlight to recharge its batteries. It sent its final message on March 22, 2010.

"I am very depressed — Spirit has been my baby for seven years now," said John Wright, a member of the rover's driving team who began directing Spirit's movements days after it landed on the Martian surface. "We were waiting and waiting to hear something, and never did."

Even in death, Spirit's scientific contributions will continue, Blaney said. Researchers will monitor the craft and its tire tracks from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to learn how wind and dust remake the Martian surface.

thomas.maugh@latimes.com

The Bibi-Barack Chess Game, Ctd
ANDREW SULLIVAN
(The Daily Beast 22 May 2011)
A reader of “The Dish” makes an important point:

You've been writing things like the following piece of sarcasm:
"Obama committed a foul by actually stating out loud that the 1967 border is the obvious line around which a territorial settlement can be made. He violated the Washington consensus that the American president must let Israel direct and guide his entire relations with every other power in the Middle East."

Let's be fair here. The "US policy" you speak of isn't so much a US policy as it is a US attempt to "direct and guide" Israel's "relations with other powers in the Middle East."
Now, that's not to say I'm against you. The outrage against Obama's position is inexcusable, but that's not because Obama's positions are strictly an American concern and Israel doesn't get a say. It's inexcusable simply because Obama's position is so sensible that nobody should oppose it, regardless of whose mouth it comes from.
I'm also not trying to say that we should follow the lead of one side or the other. America and the international community play an important part in any attempts to broker peace, and if there's to be any hope of achieving this, we and other nations must be able to suggest compromises and exert diplomatic pressure in their support.

What I'm saying is that I think it's important that we see the issue clearly. America is a major power using its influence to interfere in affairs where it has no legitimate state interest. This is justified on humanitarian grounds. (The following are American policy interests which do not morally justify our interference: propping up a useful ally, vindicating our embarrassing past failure to help solve this issue, or pandering to American voters and AIPAC.) All of this is fine, and is nothing to be ashamed of. I would go so far as to say Israel and Palestine themselves should be grateful that the international community is willing to play a role in solving the problems they can't solve themselves.

But I think we lose credibility when we treat the borders of other nations as a "US policy" issue and claim that those nations have no right to criticize this policy. It starts to look like imperialism. And there's just no reason for it: least of all on this issue where we're so obviously right. Wouldn't we be better served by a humble stance which would accentuate how badly the hard right is overreacting?

Andrew Sullivan’s response:

Tactically, yes, which is what Obama is doing. Strategically, yes, as long it isn't interpreted as weakness or lack of will. But here's my core disagreement with my reader: I do think that a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine is a legitimate state interest. I didn't a few years ago. I thought that the whole morass was so fucked up we'd be better off ignoring it.

Two things changed my mind: the realization after 9/11 and the Iraq war that we cannot readjust our relations with the Muslim and Arab worlds by military force alone, that the legacy of the Bush administration was potentially catastrophic without a major re-set, and that Obama's presidency and then the Green Revolution and Arab Spring have given the US a uniquely propitious moment to advance our interests across the globe, defang Jihadism and make strategic advances in the war on terror. The alternative is one Gaza war or Abu Ghraib after another.

And this is a second reason for urgent change. The corruption of permanent warfare, the damage it does to our moral standards, the polarizing effect it has everywhere, the dangers it poses to our constitution: these have persuaded me that we really do have to make a change - as an urgent matter of national self-interest. I see Obama as a providential vehicle for that change. Which is why I want him so desperately to persevere and why I am furious at Netanyahu's Cheney-like contempt for him.

And whether it is fully justified or not, Israel's refusal to agree with a real, contiguous, independent, demilitarized Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem gets in the way. It is the concrete wall between our being able to defuse and defeat Jihadism and our being at its permanent mercy. Sticking to this alliance as doggedly as we have in the past is not helping us and not helping Israel. Obama has been brave in stating this fact, something that is integral to his global promise. He is not just representing the US, he is representing a global generation that will not tolerate this brutalizing kind of dead-end neo-colonialism any longer.

It may well be that the Palestinians will squander yet another golden opportunity. In fact, that seems more than likely. But it is in our core national interest to keep the opportunity alive. It seems to me that the reason Netanyahu is so recalcitrant is that he is afraid that he might get yes for an answer from the Palestinians this time. Hence his desperate attempt to outlast Obama and this window of hope

Thinking about Obama & Israel and the near future
Knight Moves: Bibi v. Barry
Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg THE NEW YORKER
Friday 20 May 2011
I only caught the last minute or so of Obama’s televised Oval Office “exchange” with Netanyahu after their private meeting today. I gather that the whole thing was as tense and stilted as what I saw. But the White House won the day’s afternoon cable-news faceoff by scheduling a live broadcast of the President’s visit to C.I.A. headquarters an hour or so later, where he solemnly thanked the Agency’s troops for their role in the bagging of bin Laden.
This was another move in a chess game that has been going on for more than a month, beginning when Netanyahu’s office arranged for the House Republicans to invite Bibi to the Capitol to address Congress. This outrageous (some might say) collusion between the right-wing parties of the United States and Israel was designed to box in the President by having Bibi set the stage for the next round of Israel/Palestine/U.S. diplomacy by using the pomp of a joint session to seize control of the agenda.
Obama’s countermove was to beat him to the punch with a speech of his own. No doubt the President was planning to speak at length about the Arab Spring at some point and (in the same speech or another) about Israel/Palestine. But the G.O.P./Likud alliance dictated the timing, which in turn has to have affected the substance, and probably not in a good way.
Almost everybody was in some way disappointed with what Obama had to say, myself included. The President himself seemed ill at ease; the speech, crisp on paper, was soggy in delivery. In terms of American domestic politics, of course, there was only one part that really counts in a big way. Obama said many of what people of my general orientation on “the issue” regard as sensible things. He called for a Palestinian state roughly along 1967 lines, with roughly equal swaps of territory. (This formula has been an obvious part of any solution for many years, but apparently no American President had ever embraced it publicly and overtly before.) He said that the state must be “demilitarized.” He said it should be “contiguous,” suggesting that certain settlements—especially the big ones deep inside the West Bank—could not be annexed to Israel. But there was no action plan—no dramatic step like having Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suspend most of her other activities to take direct charge of moving the process forward in a decisive way.
The President wants to make peace and presumably knows that it won’t happen without a huge and politically brutal American effort. Such an effort would probably provoke the Israel lobby (a better name for which would be the Likud lobby) into an all-out fight against his reëlection. Netanyahu may not be personally and psychologically capable of making the necessary concessions. In any case he couldn’t make them without bringing down his own government, which relies on the extreme revanchist right for its survival, and forming a new coalition with opposition parties like the center-left/center-right Kadima. The rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas, though probably a precondition for an eventual settlement, makes it harder for the Palestinian side to make their own necessary concessions, at least in the short term. Meanwhile, this week’s mass marches along the borders suggest that the Arab Spring has finally come knocking at Israel’s door. They were marred not only by deadly gunfire from Israeli troops but also by Palestinian rock-throwing and Molotov cocktails. Luckily for Bibi (and unluckily for Israel’s ultimate security), most Palestinians still don’t quite seem to grasp the potential power of nonviolence, which could have got them their state decades ago.
I assume that Obama, as he often does, is playing the long game. The big moves people like me crave may well be part of his game plan. But I can’t help worrying that so much is changing so fast that the long run will run away from him and it’ll all be too late. If it isn’t already.

ANDREW SULLIVAN REPLIES
The Dish. (Blog) Daily Beast Saturday 21 May 2011
The Bibi-Barack Chess Game

It has indeed been a remarkable week, and as the blog has shown, one that took me by surprise. I saw nothing that new in the president's speech on Israel-Palestine - just a minimal request directed to both sides based on a settlement everyone knows is the only equitable one, and that has been the cornerstone of US policy for a very long time. But the rank hysteria that immediately sprang from Jerusalem and quickly enveloped the far-right-wing-media-industrial-complex, revealed far more plainly than before that the gulf between Israel and the rest of the world is simply vast.
It appears that the maximum Netanyahu would allow in any two state solution are some kind of autonomous bantustans in the West Bank, surrounded by Israeli military and security forces and buffered at the Jordan border with IDF troops. Forget about Jerusalem and the right of return. If this is Israel's bottom line, there will be no peace, and there should be no peace, because of the rank injustice of this non-solution. More to the point, Netanyahu is no longer on the Israeli fringe. As we've tried to document in our series of posts "An Epidemic Of Not Watching", there is very solid and wide support in Israel for such a maximalist position, and in America, this is what most of the American Jewish Establishment has fatefully backed.
What strikes me is the visceral and emotional power behind the AIPAC line, displayed in Netanyahu's contemptuous, disgraceful, desperate public dressing down of the American president in the White House. Just observe the tone of Netanyahu's voice, and the Cheney-like determination to impose his will on the world, regardless of anyone else, and certainly without the slightest concern for his ally's wider foreign policy and security needs. It seems clear to me that he believes that an American president, backed by the Quartet, must simply bow toward Israel's own needs, as he perceives them, rather than the other way round. Has Netanyahu ever asked, one wonders, what he could actually do to help Obama, president of Israel's oldest, and strongest ally in an era of enormous social and political change? That, it seems, is not how this alliance works. Moroever, an alliance in which one party is acting in direct conflict with the needs and goals of the other is an unstable one. Yes, there are unshakeable, powerful bonds between the two countries, and rightly so. But emotional bonds are not enough if, in the end, core national interests collide - and no compromise is possible.
The logic of this seems rather dark to me.
Netanyahu's current position means that the US is supposed to sacrifice its broader goals of reconciliation with an emergent democratic Arab world, potentially jeopardize its relations with a democratic Egypt, isolate itself from every other ally, and identify the US permanently with a state that, in its current configuration and with its current behavior, deepens and inflames the global conflict with Jihadist Islam. Netanyahu, in other words, wants the US to clasp itself to Israel's total distrust of every Arab state and population in an era where it is vital for the US to do exactly the opposite.
And it is absurd not to notice Obama's even-handedness. It's clear he won't legitimize Hamas until Hamas legitimizes itself by acknowledging Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state and dropping its virulent, violent anti-Semitism. He rebuked Abbas for going the UN route. Like any US president, he is committed to Israel's security and is, indeed, vital to it. But all he asks is a good faith attempt by the Israelis to acknowledge that their future state has to be based on the 1967 lines with landswaps. Indefensible? Says who? With a regional monopoly of over a hundred nuclear warheads and the best intelligence and military in its neigborhood, and a vibrant economy, Israel is not vulnerable. And in so far as it may be vulnerable - to Iran's nuclear gambit - its government is alienating the indispensable ally in this deserved quest for security. This is panic and paranoia, not reason and self-interest.
And no one seems to appreciate Obama's political courage in all this. Obama seems to understand that an equitable two-state solution is a key crucible for the change he is seeking with respect to the Muslim world, the minimum necessary to advance US interests in the region and against Jihadism abroad. With each month in office, he has pursued this, through humiliation after humiliation from the Israelis, who are openly trying to lobby the press, media, political parties and Congress to isolate this president and destroy his vision for peace and the historic and generational potential his presidency still promises. To achieve this, he has to face down the apocalyptic Christianist right, the entire FNC-RNC media machine, a sizable chunk of his party's financial base, and the US Congress. And yet on he pushes - civilly, rationally, patiently.
This really is a titanic struggle between fear and hope. What has changed since Gaza is the context. The Arab Spring has, in my view, made fear more dangerous and hope more necessary. The democratic spring - from Tehran to Tunis - is the opposite force to the logic of the dead-end Gaza war, as to the mindset of Assad and Qaddafi.
If Israelis refuse to rise to this occasion, however fraught with risk, then they will cede moral authority, even more than they already have, to those they are still seeking to control. And if they persist in this, they risk bringing about the very existential conflict they say they fear so much. It is the task of a true ally to tell this truth. And to persevere.

ANDREW SULLIVAN DAILY BEAST SATURDAY MAY 21 2011

Neo-Nazi Father Is Killed; Son, 10, Steeped in Beliefs, Is Accused

By JESSE McKINLEY NY TIMES
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — The day before he allegedly shot his father, the sandy-haired 10-year-old boy showed off a prized possession to a visitor. It was a thin leather belt emblazoned with a silver insignia of the Nazi SS.

“Look what my dad got me,” the boy said shyly, perched on the living room stairs, one of the few quiet spots in a house with five children.

A little more than 12 hours later, the police say, the boy stood near those stairs with a handgun and killed his father, Jeff Hall, as he lay on the living room couch. It was about 4 a.m. on May 1; paramedics declared Mr. Hall dead when they arrived.

The police say that the killing was intentional, but that the motives behind it are still not fully understood. But whatever the reason, it has cast fresh light on the fringe group to which Mr. Hall devoted his life: the National Socialist Movement, the nation’s largest neo-Nazi party, whose message stands in surreal juxtaposition to the suburban, workaday trappings of many of its members.

Mr. Hall, who led a chapter of the group in Riverside, Calif., east of Los Angeles, had predicted that his political activities — in a world rife with hatred, suspicion and violence — would lead to his demise.

“I want a white society,” Mr. Hall said. “I believe in secession. I believe in giving my life for secession.”

What he could never have expected was that his death might come at the hand of his son, whom he was steeping in his beliefs of white supremacy and its obsessions with weapons, racist speech and Nazi regalia.

Over the last two months, The New York Times attended and documented a series of events held by Mr. Hall and the National Socialist Movement, or N.S.M., including virulent, hate-filled rallies as well as barbecues and baby showers in the backyard of his Southern California home.

Mr. Hall was a rising force in the party, which has capitalized on a tide of anti-immigrant sentiment to attract members — young racist skinheads, aging Ku Klux Klan members, and extremists on the left and the right.

Based in Detroit, it is the largest supremacist group, with about 400 members in 32 states, though much of its prominence followed the decay of Aryan Nation and other neo-Nazi groups, experts say. The movement is led by Jeff Schoep, a suit-wearing spokesman for what he calls a “white civil rights movement,” which he views as no different from other groups that defend minorities.

“If we’re a hate group,” said Mr. Schoep in an interview, “then Martin Luther King is a racist or a bigot also.”

Mr. Hall, 32, had embraced the movement and vice versa, earning a loyal following with his energy, unapologetic stands on race and frequent meetings and parties at his home. In recent years, he and other members had staged rallies that sparked street battles in several states, including a skirmish in Pemberton, N.J., during the group’s national conference in April, where rocks, tree branches, folding chairs and pepper spray were used as weapons.

After the fight, Mr. Hall — wearing a black Nazi military uniform — was hungry for more. “That’s why I joined N.S.M.,” Mr. Hall said, his eyes red from mace. “What a night! I can’t wait for tomorrow!”

Mr. Hall, a garrulous plumber with a cross and a skull tattooed on the back of his shaved head, ran as a National Socialist for a seat on a local water district last fall and won a surprising 28 percent of the vote. He planned to run for office again.

Mr. Schoep has said the group wants to try its hand at more elections, and it has even tried to mimic the populist language used by some candidates during the 2010 campaign, railing against banks receiving “tax-funded federal bailouts” while Americans continue to struggle.

“The government tells us we’re in recovery,” Mr. Schoep told a crowd in New Jersey. “Well yeah, if you’re a fat cat on Wall Street, if you’re some greedy Jew running a bank that got a whole bunch of kickbacks, maybe it is better. But not for us.”

Illegal immigration has also emerged as a potent neo-Nazi talking point, and Mr. Hall relished heading to the desert on armed “border patrols.” He organized his members and spent his plumbing proceeds on night-vision goggles and ham radio licenses. Mr. Hall also bragged that he was teaching his son to use night vision equipment and shoot a gun.

And while many of those involved in the N.S.M. are alienated from their families, or struggle to explain their beliefs, Mr. Hall was open about his activities with his children. His two-story home in Riverside served as the movement’s headquarters in Southern California. Inside, photos of his five children lined the walls and a copy of “Cinderella” sat on the bookshelf.

At a recent meeting, Mr. Hall showed a video he had made of the national gathering in New Jersey and the brawl. As the end credits rolled, a version of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” played, with modified lyrics.

“The white man marches on!” it said.

One of Mr. Hall’s young daughters was watching through a screen door and chimed in.

“I love that song, Daddy,” she said.

Raphael Ezekiel, a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health who studied skinheads for his book “The Racist Mind,” said: “They’re people who feel very weak. So they’re a pushover if a person with a little bit of charisma comes along.”

And indeed, in March, Mr. Hall led a rally in Claremont, Calif., at which he preached discipline to his followers while grumbling about pat-downs from a large police contingent. About two dozen of the party followers traded insults with a larger group of counterprotesters. Mr. Hall took joy in the taunts of “Nazi Go Home!”

“I have some bad news for you,” he said. “We are home.”

A few hours later, at a St. Patrick’s Day party complete with green shot glasses and German beer, Mr. Hall gamely officiated at a sack race for his children, using the same bullhorn that he had used to lead chants of “White power!” just hours before.

In one corner of the yard, a blue-eyed blond woman wore a white supremacist T-shirt that said, “Because the beauty of white Aryan women must not perish from the earth.” Nearby, a vendor had set up a stand, selling a ragtag variety of racially tinged paraphernalia.

Fund-raising was a constant concern for Mr. Hall. He told the vendor to look into selling Che Guevara T-shirts. “He’s a murderous communist,” Mr. Hall said, “but you sell those shirts, and you fund the movement.”

At a meeting the day before he was shot, Mr. Hall hoisted a swastika banner, not far from his newborn’s bassinet. His 10-year-old son listened as Mr. Hall spoke of finding rotting bodies on the border and discussed fears of being attacked with “AIDS-infected blood” if the group was to rally in San Francisco.

After the meeting, members drifted outside to smoke and drink.

The boy sat nearby on the steps. Was he having a good time? a reporter asked. Yes, he said, though he was annoyed by his four younger sisters. But he was the eldest, he added, and a boy. “And boys are more important,” he said.

That night, Jeff Hall apparently went out with some of his members. He arrived home about midnight and, four hours later, the police received a call about shots fired.

The boy is expected to appear in court later this month; he has been charged as a juvenile with murder, and his public defender said he might plead insanity. The boy and a younger sister had been the subject of a bitter custody battle with Mr. Hall’s first wife, with a series of allegations of abuse on each side. But Mr. Hall had eventually been granted legal custody.

On Saturday, a group of Mr. Hall’s followers gathered in Southern California to mourn their leader. One, an N.S.M. official who asked not to be identified because of the attention Mr. Hall’s death had brought to the group, said that the rallies would continue, and that Mr. Hall’s ashes would be spread on the border during a patrol. The boy was not mentioned.

“Today was all about Jeff, how he would want us to carry on,” the official said. “Nobody was looking for answers.”

Ian Lovett and Julie Platner contributed reporting from Los Angeles, and Malia Wollan from San Francisco.

Gingrich Set to Run, With Wife in Central Role

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG NY TIMES
WASHINGTON — Callista Bisek’s friends from rural Wisconsin were stunned when, well over a decade ago, she confided that she was secretly dating an older, married man: Newt Gingrich.

Still in her 20s when they met, Ms. Bisek had been raised in a town of 1,500, the only child of a meat packer and a secretary. A churchgoing Roman Catholic, she had attended a Lutheran college where she practiced piano five hours a day. “Is this the wisest course for you to be taking?” Karen Olson, her best friend, recalled asking.

Today, Ms. Bisek is Mrs. Gingrich, married for 11 years, but perhaps best remembered for the six-year affair that contributed to her husband’s political downfall. His critics cast Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker, as a hypocrite who sought to impeach a president over infidelity while engaging in it himself with Ms. Bisek, who was a Congressional aide.

Yet in a curious tale of Washington reinvention, the onetime congressman from Georgia is counting on the third Mrs. Gingrich for his political redemption.

As he prepares for a Republican presidential primary run — he said Monday that he would formally declare his intentions on Wednesday — Mr. Gingrich is presenting himself as a family man who has embraced Catholicism and found God, with his wife as a kind of character witness. Depending on one’s point of view, she is a reminder of his complicated past, or his secret political weapon.

Barely a sentence goes by without Mr. Gingrich uttering the words “Callista and I.” They are constantly together — at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, at conservative political conferences, at book signings and screenings of their documentary films. She is the voice on his audio books; her face is all over his 2012 Web site, where visitors can read “A Note from Newt & Callista.”

At Villanova University on a recent Thursday night, Mrs. Gingrich warmed up the audience for a showing of the couple’s movie about Pope John Paul II by signing books and DVDs in her left-handed curlicue. But when asked whether she is ready for the scrutiny a campaign would bring, she smiled tightly and grew silent.

Mr. Gingrich answered for her. “Seems to be,” he said, with uncharacteristic tentativeness. “We’ve talked about it for a year. It’s difficult.”

Mr. Gingrich is well aware that social conservatives are skeptical of him because he did not emphasize their issues in Congress, but also because of his two divorces and admission of infidelity. He has been meeting with religious leaders around the country to address their concerns.

Deal Hudson, president of Catholic Advocate, a conservative group, said that if Mrs. Gingrich “wants to be first lady,” she would probably have to discuss their relationship as well.

So far she has not. Both Gingriches declined to be interviewed for this article.

“They would say they wished they had met in a different time in their lives under different circumstances,” said Jackie Cottrell, a friend who worked with Mrs. Gingrich as a staff member on Capitol Hill. “But it’s important to note that they brought their family together in a loving way.”

Mr. Gingrich took up golf because his wife plays; she has adopted his political agenda. In 2009, after years of attending Mass to hear her sing in her church choir, he converted to Catholicism. And when Mrs. Gingrich, who plays French horn with the city band in Fairfax, Va., appears in concerts, her husband totes her black instrument case. “I’m a band groupie and a choir groupie,” Mr. Gingrich likes to say.

How eager she is for him to run after he has been out of office since 1999 is a matter of discussion among their friends. Vin Weber, the former Republican congressman from Minnesota, said he is “quite convinced” Mrs. Gingrich is happily on board. “They’ve been out of public life,” Mr. Weber said, “and I think she misses the excitement of that.”

Others say she wants her husband to run because he wants to. She has hired Ms. Olson as her chief of staff; she is also writing a children’s book, due out in September — just in time for her to go on a book tour and reintroduce herself to the public as the primary race heats up.

“I think she has stepped out of her comfort zone more to promote the movies and the books and has found that she enjoyed that,” said Ms. Cottrell. “That’s been a little bit of a toe in the water.“

At 45, 22 years her husband’s junior, Mrs. Gingrich always looks perfectly composed. She favors an almost retro look — platinum hair teased and sprayed, bold-colored suits accessorized by a triple strand of pearls or eye-popping diamond jewelry. In college, friends say, she once signed up for an 8 a.m. bowling class and rolled a 200 wearing a pencil skirt.

Still, they worry aloud that her “physical presence,” in the words of Matt Gunderson, a childhood friend, makes her seem distant or stuffy. They see a woman who, caricatured as a “blond bombshell” in the press years ago, guards her public image.

“That’s a role she has had to assume,” said Tim Peter, a classmate of Mrs. Gingrich’s at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, “because that one morning you go out for the paper without your makeup on, that’s the day you wind up on the front page.”

As a young girl in Whitehall, Wis., Ms. Bisek experienced politics through the prism of community ties, not ideology. Mr. Gunderson’s elder brother, Steve, was a congressman; as high school students, Ms. Bisek and her friends knocked on doors and appeared in parades as a singing campaign troupe.

“We were ‘Glee’ before ‘Glee,’ ” the younger Mr. Gunderson said.

If she had a career dream, it was playing for an orchestra, not making headlines in Washington. Yet her high school yearbook suggests a yearning to stand out.

“Some people strive to be one of the many,” she wrote. “I strive to be one of the few.”

She worked for Representative Gunderson, a Republican, in Washington after college, eventually landing a job with the House Agriculture Committee, where she stayed until Democrats took over in 2007. Today, she runs Gingrich Productions, making documentaries in conjunction with Citizens United, the nonprofit group that drew national attention in a Supreme Court case last year. While Citizens United does technical production, Mrs. Gingrich, a former music major, is especially hands-on with the musical scores.

She and her husband work from adjoining offices in a building on K Street, Washington’s lobbying corridor, home to the sprawling enterprise that Gingrich aides call “Newt Inc.,” which produces books and films at a dizzying pace. Their efforts are planned around what Ms. Olson calls their “thematic — the message of what they stand for.”

Their new focus is American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States is unique and stands above other nations. Mrs. Gingrich’s children’s book is devoted to the topic; so is one by Mr. Gingrich, due out next month. It is also the theme of their newest documentary — no surprise given that many Republicans, including Mr. Gingrich, claim that President Obama rejects exceptionalism.

Mr. Gingrich will have to dismantle his busy operation for a presidential run, though aides say Gingrich Productions will survive, with his wife in charge. Looking ahead to the campaign, Gingrich intimates are already envisioning how Mrs. Gingrich, with her college ties to Iowa, might help her husband there.

The same friends who tried to talk her out of out of dating him more than a decade ago have concluded that she knew what she was doing, and are banking that voters will forgive and forget. Ms. Olson summed up their history in what might just become a campaign catchphrase.

“They’re a great couple,” she said, “that had a nontraditional start.”

Barclay Walsh contributed research.

OSMA BIN LADEN 'a domestic life'

Boston Globe

WASHINGTON — The most-wanted terrorist in the world lived his last five years imprisoned behind the barbed wire and high walls of his home in Abbottabad, his days consumed by darkness and domesticity.
US officials believe that Osama bin Laden spent many hours on the computer, relying on couriers to bring him thumb drives packed with information from the outside world. He lived mostly in two indoor rooms except for daily pacing in his courtyard, near a lush inner garden framed by poplar trees.

His once-large entourage of Arab bodyguards was down to one trusted Pakistani courier and the courier’s brother, who also had the job of buying goats, sheep, and Coca-Cola for the household.

While bin Laden’s world had shrunk, he was still revered at home — by his three wives, by his children, and by the tight, interconnected circle of loyalists in the compound. He did not do chores or tend to the cows and water buffalo on the south side of the compound like the other men. The household, US officials figure, knew how important it was for him to devote his time to Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization he founded and was still actively running at the time of his death.

The Obama administration released five videos yesterday recovered from bin Laden’s hideout that show him threatening the United States, condemning capitalism, and, in the most candid scenes, watching news coverage of himself on television.

The videos were the first materials to be released from what a senior American intelligence official described as “the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever.’’ The trove, which includes hundreds of computer storage devices, hard drives, videos, documents, and personal papers, was seized by the United States assault team that killed bin Laden early Monday.

The administration released the videos in part to promote a stunning intelligence triumph and to try to further diminish bin Laden’s legacy and popular appeal.

Perhaps the most revealing video shows bin Laden sitting on the floor in a small room, wrapped in a blanket as he watches news clips about himself on television.

The other videos consist of outtakes from bin Laden’s recorded messages to his followers. The official said that in those videos, bin Laden’s beard had been dyed black to make him appear younger. The video of him watching television, however, shows him with a mostly white beard.

The senior intelligence official said that bin Laden’s concern about his appearance suggested that he was intensely interested in the image he presented to his supporters, and that he was deeply immersed in the propaganda efforts of Al Qaeda. That view contrasts sharply with earlier theories that he had become a marginal character who served as a figurehead for the group.

The official described the bin Laden compound as a command-and-control center for Al Qaeda, where attacks were plotted and where bin Laden remained deeply involved in the operations of Qaeda lieutenants.

US officials say there is much they do not know about the last years of bin Laden, who was shot dead by Navy SEAL commandos in his third-floor bedroom, and the peculiar life of the compound.

But what has emerged so far, in interviews with US and Pakistani military and intelligence officials and bin Laden’s neighbors in the middle-class hamlet where he had been hiding, is a portrait of an isolated man, perhaps a little bored, presiding over family life while plotting mayhem — still desperate to be heard, intent on outsize influence, musing in his handwritten notebooks about killing more Americans.

“My father would not look forward to staying indoors month after month, because he is a man who loves everything about nature,’’ Omar bin Laden, a son of bin Laden, said in an e-mail message in 2009. “But if I were to say what he would need to survive, I would say food and water. He would go inward and occupy himself with his mind.’’

Abbottabad, a scenic hill cantonment for the British Raj and later home to the elite military academy that is Pakistan’s West Point, became the bin Laden family base in late 2005. Their large compound, in a new neighborhood on the outskirts of town, is now the most photographed house in the country, with stories spilling forth from astonished neighbors.

Bin Laden, who was the tall man CIA officers watched pacing the courtyard from a surveillance post nearby, never went out. The neighbors knew the family as Arshad Khan and Tariq Khan, the local aliases of the trusted courier — he also went by the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — and his brother.

The Khans seemed pleasant enough, but they kept to themselves behind their 12-foot concrete walls and barbed wire, the neighbors said.

They never invited anyone in or went to others’ homes, although they did go to prayers in the mosque and funerals in the neighborhood.

“They never told us why they came here,’’ said Naheed Abassi, 21, a driver and farm laborer who said he worked on construction of the house. The courier and his brother, both in their 30s and killed in the raid, were sons of a man bin Laden, 54, had known for decades. A bin Laden son, Khalid, who lived in the compound and was also killed, was married to a sister of either the courier or his brother, Pakistani officials said.

On the night he was killed, bin Laden was in his bedroom with his youngest wife, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, whose Yemeni passport shows her to be 29 years old, 25 years bin Laden’s junior. This wife was apparently the one shot by commandos in the leg as she rushed them in an effort to protect her husband. US officials say there were also children in the bedroom.

Although US intelligence analysts are just beginning to pore over a huge trove of computer files, storage devices, and cellphones that the commandos recovered from the compound, US officials already assume that bin Laden recorded some half-dozen audio messages per year from inside the house over the last five years.

The messages were meant for dissemination to the outside world, but to avoid detection, bin Laden had no Internet, e-mail, or phone lines that he could use to send them.

Instead, the audio files were evidently stored on a CD or tiny thumb drive and passed from courier to courier until they reached As Sahab, Al Qaeda’s media arm.

Congressional officials who received intelligence briefings last week said that they were struck by how bin Laden’s low-profile, low-tech lifestyle protected him for years, but in the end might have hastened his death.

Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who serves on the Armed Services Committee, said he was surprised that bin Laden was not prepared for the kind of attack the commandos carried out.

“There was no escape route, no tunnels, not even false rooms in the house in which to hide,’’ he said. “It makes you wonder: At what point did that extra degree of vigilance he had get dulled by routine?’’

© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.

Today I purchaed a Pan Digital

Today I purchaed a Pan Digital

What Drives History

By DAVID BROOKS

NY TIMES
Osama Bin Laden’s mother was about 15 at the time of his birth. Nicknamed “The Slave” inside the family, she was soon discarded and sent off to be married to a middle manager in the Bin Laden construction firm.

Osama revered the father he rarely got to see and adored his mother. As a teenager, he “would lie at her feet and caress her,” a family friend told Steve Coll, for his definitive biography “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century.”

Like many people who go on to alter history, for good and evil, Bin Laden lost his father when he was about 9. The family patriarch was killed in a plane crash caused by an American pilot in the Saudi province of Asir. (Five of the Sept. 11 hijackers would come from that province. His brother was later killed in a plane crash on American soil.)

Osama was an extremely shy child, Coll writes. He was an outsider in his new family but also the golden goose. His allowance and inheritance was the source of his family’s wealth.

He lived a suburban existence and was sent to an elite school, wearing a blue blazer and being taught by European teachers. As a boy he watched “Bonanza” and became infatuated by another American show called “Fury,” about a troubled orphaned boy who goes off to a ranch and tames wild horses. He was a mediocre student but religiously devout. He made it to university, but didn’t last long. He married his first cousin when she was 14 and went into the family business.

I repeat these personal facts because we have a tendency to see history as driven by deep historical forces. And sometimes it is. But sometimes it is driven by completely inexplicable individuals, who combine qualities you would think could never go together, who lead in ways that violate every rule of leadership, who are able to perpetrate enormous evils even though they themselves seem completely pathetic.

Analysts spend their lives trying to anticipate future threats and understand underlying forces. But nobody could have possibly anticipated Bin Laden’s life and the giant effect it would have. The whole episode makes you despair about making predictions.

As a family man, Bin Laden was interested in sex, cars and work but was otherwise devout. He did not permit photography in his presence. He banned “Sesame Street,” Tabasco sauce and straws from his home. He covered his eyes if an unveiled woman entered the room. He liked to watch the news, but he had his children stand by the set and turn down the volume whenever music came on.

As Coll emphasized in an interview on Monday, this sort of devoutness, while not everybody’s cup of tea, was utterly orthodox in his society. He was not a rebel as a young man.

After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he organized jihadi tourism: helping young, idealistic Arab fighters who wanted to spend some time fighting the invaders. He was not a fighter himself, more of a courier and organizer, though after he survived one Soviet bombardment, he began to fashion a self-glorifying mythology.

He was still painfully shy but returned with an enormous sense of entitlement. In 1990, he wanted to run the Saudi response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He also thought he should run the family business. After he was shot down for both roles, the radicalism grew.

We think of terrorism leaders as hard and intimidating. Bin Laden was gentle and soft, with a flaccid handshake. Yet his soldiers have told researchers such as Peter Bergen, the author of “The Longest War,” that meeting him was a deeply spiritual experience. They would tell stories of his ability to avoid giving offense and forgive transgressors.

We think of terrorists as trying to build cells and organizations, but Bin Laden created an anti-organization — an open-source set of networks with some top-down control but much decentralization and a willingness to embrace all recruits, regardless of race, sect or nationality.

We think of war fighters as using violence to seize property and power, but Bin Laden seemed to regard murder as a subdivision of brand management. It was a way to inspire the fund-raising networks, dominate the news and manipulate meaning.

In short, Osama Bin Laden seemed to live in an ethereal, postmodern world of symbols and signifiers and also a cruel murderous world of rage and humiliation. Even the most brilliant intelligence analyst could not anticipate such an odd premodern and postglobalized creature, or could imagine that such a creature would gain such power.

I just wish there were a democratic Bin Laden, that amid all the Arab hunger for dignity and freedom there was another inexplicable person with the ability to frame narratives and propel action — for good, not evil.

So far, there doesn’t seem to be, which is tragic because individuals matter.

The Most Wanted Face of Terrorism
By KATE ZERNIKE and MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN

NY TIMES OBIT
Osama bin Laden, who was 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 Sept. 11, 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 videotape, taunting the United States and Western civilization.

“Do you want bin Laden dead?” a reporter asked President George W. Bush six days after the Sept. 11 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 December 2001 battle at an Afghan mountain redoubt called Tora Bora, near the border of 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 officer of the C.I.A. 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 his Al Qaeda organization 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 his group, Al Qaeda — which means “the base” — a multinational enterprise to export terror around the globe.

For years after the Sept. 11 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 e-mail beamed by satellite around the world. Al Qaeda members kept bomb-making manuals on CD-ROM and communicated with encrypted memos on laptops, leading one American official to declare that bin Laden possessed better communication 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 C.E.O.’s, 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 question 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.”

The Turning Point

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, 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; 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 Sept. 11, 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 C.I.A. 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 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 No. 1.”

The C.I.A. 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 1997 to July 2004.

The intelligence was never good enough to pull the trigger. By the summer of 2001, the C.I.A. was convinced that Al Qaeda was on the verge of a spectacular attack. But no one knew where or when it would come.

The Early Life

By accounts of people close to the family, Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden was born in 1957, the seventh son and 17th child among 50 or more of his father’s children.

His father, Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden, had emigrated 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, and 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. When the Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem was set on fire by a deranged tourist in 1969, the senior bin Laden was chosen to rebuild it. Soon afterward, he was chosen to refurbish the mosques at Mecca and Medina as well. In interviews years later, Osama bin Laden would recall proudly that his father had sometimes prayed in all three holy places in one day.

His father was a devout Muslim who welcomed pilgrims and clergy into his home. He required all his children to work for the family company, meaning that Osama spent summers working on road projects. The elder bin Laden died in a plane crash when Osama was 10. The siblings each inherited millions — 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 15.

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. Bin Laden senior 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 billion, distributing Snapple drinks, Volkswagen cars and Disney products across the Middle East. On Sept. 11, 2001, several bin Laden siblings were living in the United States.

Bin Laden had been educated — and, indeed, steeped, as many Saudi children are — in Wahhabism, 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 — particularly, 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 17.

Soon afterward, he began earning a degree at King Abdul-Aziz University in Jidda. It was there that he shaped his future 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 Koran.

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, Shiite 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. And 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 guest houses 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 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 C.I.A. 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.

The Movement

Through the looking glass of Sept. 11, 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 C.I.A. 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 new 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 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 Jidda, fearing that his outspokenness would offend the Americans. Bin Laden fled to 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.

The Terrorism

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 Shiite 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 Dec. 29, 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 Feb. 26, 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, 18 American troops 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 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 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-ROM. 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 1996, a truck bomb destroyed Khobar Towers, an American military residence in Dhahran. It killed 19 soldiers.

Bin Laden fled to Afghanistan that summer after Sudan expelled him under pressure from the Americans and Saudis, and he forged an alliance with Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban. In August 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 photos to direct where the truck bomb should be driven.

Bin Laden was becoming more emboldened, summoning Western reporters to his hideouts 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 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 Aug. 7, 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 suspected 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 No. 1 or Enemy No. 2 does not hurt us,” he said. “Osama bin Laden is confident that the Islamic nation will carry out its duty.”

In January 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.

The Aftermath

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 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 Sept. 11.

“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.

Michael T. Kaufman, a principal writer of this article, died in 2010. Tim Weiner contributed reporting.

Osama Bin Laden Is Dead!
By PETER BAKER and HELENE COOPER

NY TIMES
WASHINGTON — 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 dramatic 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 C.I.A. operatives had finally cornered Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda who had eluded them for nearly a decade, and shot him to death at a compound in Pakistan.

“For over two decades, Bin Laden has been Al Qaeda’s leader and symbol,” the president said in a statement carried on television 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.” He added, “We must and we will remain vigilant at home and abroad.”

The death of Bin Laden is a defining moment in the American-led war on terrorism. What remains to be seen is whether it galvanizes his followers by turning him into a martyr, or whether the death serves as a turning of the page in the war in Afghanistan and gives further impetus to the Obama administration to bring American troops home.

Bin Laden was killed nearly 10 years after Qaeda terrorists hijacked three American passenger jets and crashed them into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside Washington. A fourth hijacked jet crashed into countryside of Pennsylvania.

Late Sunday night, as the president was speaking, cheering crowds gathered outside the gates of the White House as word of Bin Laden’s death began trickling out, waving American flags, shouting in happiness and chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” In New York City, crowds sang "The Star-Spangled Banner."

“This is important news for us, and for the world,” said Gordon Felt, president of the Families of Flight 93, the airliner that crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside after passengers fought with hijackers. “It cannot ease our pain, or bring back our loved ones. It does bring a measure of comfort that the mastermind of the Sept. 11 tragedy and the face of global terror can no longer spread his evil.”

Bin Laden escaped from American troops in the mountains of Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in 2001 and, although he was widely believed to be in Pakistan, American intelligence had largely lost his trail for most of the years that followed. They picked up fresh clues last August. Mr. Obama said in his national address Sunday night that it had taken months to firm up that information, and that last week he had determined that there was enough to authorize a secret operation in Pakistan.

The forces killed Bin Laden in what Mr. Obama called a “targeted operation.”

“No Americans were harmed,” the president said. “They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”

Mr. Obama noted that the operation that had Bin Laden was carried out with the cooperation of Pakistani officials. But a senior American official and a Pakistani intelligence official said that the Pakistanis had not been informed of the operation in advance.

The fact that Bin Laden was killed deep inside Pakistan was bound once again to raise questions about just how much Pakistan is willing to work with the United States, since Pakistani officials denied for years that Mr. bin Laden was in their country. It also raised the question of whether Bin Laden’s whereabouts were known to Pakistan’s spy agency.

It was surprising that Bin Laden was killed not in Pakistan’s remote tribal area, where he had long been rumored to have taken refuge, but rather in in the city of Abbottadad, about an hour’s drive drive north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

Abbottabad is home to a large Pakistani military base, a military academy of the Pakistani army, and a major hospital and other facilities that would could have served as support for Osama Bin Laden.

A senior Indonesian militant, Umar Patek, was arrested in Abbottabad this year. Mr. Patek was protected by a Qaeda operative, a postal clerk who worked under cover at the main post office, a signal that Al Qaeda may have had others in the area.

In apparent preparation for the American operation, many officials posted at the United States Consulate in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's northwest region, were told suddenly to leave on Friday, leaving behind only a core group of essential staff members.

The officials said they had been told to leave because of kidnapping fears. They said they were not told of the impending operation in nearby Abbotabad against Bin Laden.

Bin Laden's death comes as relations between the United States and Pakistan have fallen to their lowest point in memory and as differences over how to fight Al Qaeda-linked militants have become clearer.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, publicly criticized the Pakistani military two weeks ago for failing to act against extremists allied to Al Qaeda who are sheltered in the Pakistani tribal areas of North Waziristan.

The United States has supported the Pakistani military with nearly $20 billion since 9/11 for counterterrorism campaigns, but American officials have complained that the Pakistanis were unable to quell the militancy.

Last week, the head of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, said that Pakistan had broken the back of terrorism in Pakistan, a statement that was received with much skepticism by American officials.

Mr. Obama made it clear in his remarks at the White House on Sunday that the United States still faces significant national security threats despite Bin Laden's death.

“His death does not mark the end of our effort,” Mr. Obama said. “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.”

Reporting was contributed by Mark Mazzetti from Washington, Jane Perlez from Australia and Pir Zubair Shah from New York.