Tỗng Thống Obama tuyên bố: "Osama bin Laden, kẽ chũ mưu vụ dánh sập "World Trade Center" tai Nữu Ước ngày 11 tháng 9 năm 2001
dã bị giết tại Pakistan và thây cũ zã dang dược Hoa Kỳ gìn zữ".
Máy Gơơgle zịch thuật
AP Photo
Tin mới 5 fút...
President Obama announced on May 1 that Osama bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan, nearly 10 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. While the dramatic East Wing announcement marked the fulfillment of President George W. Bush's vow to capture the Al Qaeda leader "dead or alive," the cascade of conflicts around the globe that the attacks prompted represent his still-raging legacy.
The first mention of Mr. bin Laden in The New York Times came deep within a 1994 story on Algeria, which described him as "a wealthy Saudi financier who bankrolls Islamic militant groups from Algeria to Saudi Arabia." Two years later, the paper devoted more than 3,000 words to an article about the role of wealthy Saudi businessmen in financing terrorism that focused in large part on Mr. bin Laden. "Officials in several countries, including the United States, say Mr. Bin Laden's money, as well as money he has raised, paid for terrorist acts in Europe, Africa and the Middle East against Americans and other Westerners," the article said. Still, he remained little known to the general public until the bombings of embassies in Africa in 1998 and of the destroyer the U.S.S. Cole in 1999 established him and his group, Al Qaeda, as the preeminent terrorist threat to American interests.
By now, of course, Mr. bin Laden's life story is all too well known: his childhood in one of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest families, his decision to join the Islamic resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the growth of Al Qaeda; the failed American attempts to kill him in the late 1990's; his backing of a plot hatched by a lieutenant, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, that grew into the Sept. 11th attacks; his escape from Tora Bora in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan after an American invasion routed the Taliban, his protectors; his success at evading capture ever since. While in hiding, Mr. bin Laden occasionally issued new threats against the United States.
Messages from an Unknown Location
Since escaping American troops in late 2001, Mr. bin Laden, 53, issued some 30 messages, in audio, video or electronic text. Intelligence officials believe they were passed from hand to hand repeatedly to obscure any trail back to his hiding place.
Nearly a decade after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. bin Laden remained a potent symbolic figure. But American officials believed, based on intercepted communications from second- and third-tier Qaeda operatives, that he also was still helping to shape Al Qaeda’s strategy.
Analysts studied the rambling messages for clues to his whereabouts, and the releases gave clues about what Mr. bin Laden was reading and thinking. The pronouncements sometimes bragged of past plots or warned of new ones, and most attracted only fleeting media attention. His less menacing comments, like an October 2010 missive calling for disaster relief to Pakistan, appeared intended to show that his concerns extended beyond scheming violence against those he saw as enemies of Islam.
Wherever he hid, he followed the news closely. A 2007 message carped that Democratic control of Congress had not ended the war in Iraq (he blamed “big corporations”), complained that the Bush administration was not moving against global warming and commended the writings of Noam Chomsky, the leftist professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In eight messages in 2009, he remarked on the tensions between Georgia and Russia, recommended Jimmy Carter’s book supporting Palestinian rights and cited two American professors’ book criticizing the pro-Israel lobby.
His mention of a book said to be by a former Central Intelligence Agency officer that Mr. bin Laden called “The Apology of a Hired Killer” set off a guessing game — including at the C.I.A. — for which of several books with similar titles he might have in mind.
A January 2010 message discussed climate change, even referring by last name to James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist who has warned of global warming. In March, in a brief statement directed to Americans, he warned that executing Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other prisoners accused of planning the Sept. 11 attacks would prompt Al Qaeda to kill any Americans in its custody.
Lawrence Wright, who studied Mr. bin Laden for his book “The Looming Tower,” said the pronouncements on climate, irrigation and agriculture in the latest recordings reflected Mr. bin Laden’s work as an avid farmer in Sudan in the early 1990s.
“He had a seed laboratory,” Mr. Wright said. “He went around Khartoum showing off his sunflowers and saying they should be in the Guinness Book of World Records.”
But he added: “It’s a little galling to hear bin Laden lecturing on flood relief when Al Qaeda has never done any socially constructive work, but has only sowed chaos.”
Mr. bin Laden had occasionally taunted President Obama, who had vowed during his presidential campaign: “We will kill bin Laden.” As president, keenly aware that intelligence agencies have few clues to the Qaeda leader’s whereabouts, Mr. Obama has not publicly repeated the pledge.
Still, finding Mr. bin Laden remained a top American goal, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in Afghanistan, insisted in August on the NBC news program “Meet the Press.”
“I think capturing or killing Osama bin Laden is still a very, very important task for all of those who are engaged in counterterrorism around the world,” General Petraeus said. But he cautioned: “I don’t think anyone knows where Osama bin Laden is.”
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