A Woman Arrested For Video Taping From Her Own Back Yard
Bin Laden Cost $3 trillion to US Economy
By most estimates, Osama bin Laden cost the United States at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years, counting the disruptions he wrought on the domestic economy, the wars and heightened security triggered by the terrorist attacks he engineered, and the direct efforts to hunt him down. Read more.
Pakistan Denies Sheltering Bin Laden
Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari, issued his first formal response to questions about how the world’s most-wanted criminal was able to live for so long in a million dollar compound near Islamabad.
Some in the U.S. press have suggested that Pakistan lacked vitality in its pursuit of terrorism, or worse yet that we were disingenuous and actually protected the terrorists we claimed to be pursuing,” Zardari wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post. “Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news, but it doesn’t reflect fact.”
“He was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone,” Zardari wrote, without offering further defense against accusations his security services should have known where bin Laden was hiding.
“Although the events of Sunday were not a joint operation, a decade of cooperation and partnership between the United States and Pakistan led up to the elimination of Osama bin Laden as a continuing threat to the civilized world.”
Bin Laden’s Death Increases Terrorist Threat on America
Because Osama Bin Laden’s death is a major blow to Al Quaeda, experts caution that this could actually incease the threat of terrorism against Americans. Government agencies are said to be on full alert for attacks by Islamic terrorists who may be trying to avenge the killing of their leader.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last night issued a preliminary “situational awareness alert,” saying bin Laden’s death could inspire retaliatory attacks from al Qaeda or its allies–or even from radicalized individuals in the United States. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said that although the department remains “at a heightened state of vigiliance,” it doesn’t plan to issue a broader security alert. Napolitano explained that DHS officials only approve that shift when “we have specific or credible information to convey to the American public.”
Former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden told Bloomberg the United States should “brace for retaliatory attacks,” as the news service put it, from al Qaeda and affiliated groups.
And former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned on NBC’s Today Show this morning: “There has been intelligence that suggested that if Osama bin Laden were ever captured or killed that there would be a violent attack on America or Europe, in one way or another.”
