Osama bin Laden’s hideout.
It was a $1 million compound right down the road from Pakistan’s version of West Point. Now it is in ruins. And KnightNews.com has the video obtained by ABC news showing the aftermath of the place where the man who plotted the worst terrorist attack in US history called home.
Because bin Laden’s hiding spot was so close to Islamabad, Pakistan and just about 1,000 feet away from the Pakistani military academy, questions are being raised by ABC news and others regarding how Pakistan wasn’t able to find out where it was harboring a terrorist. At the order of US President Barack Obama, navy seals stormed the compound and killed bin Laden after he refused to surrender. The US didn’t warn Pakistan of the operation.
See more from ABC news below, including a map showing where Bin Laden’s hiding place was and video of the area.
KnightNews.com’s Andrew Stein and political analyst Evan Weiss reported during our live streaming coverage last night how Adolf Hitler was also declared dead on May 1, marking the end of his evil reign of terror. Now, once again, May 1 is a day that will live on in the minds of a new generation of Americans, as a reminder of how justice will be done when Americans fight to achieve it. As Obama declared last night, “Justice has been done.”
Most UCF students were just around 10 years old when they learned that airplanes slammed into the Twin Towers in New York City, the Pentagon and a field in Shankesville, PA. Nearly a decade later, after having grown up in a different world than those before them, where many undoubtedly lost a friend who ended up fighting in the War on Terror, college students celebrated the fall of the man whose attacks spurred changes in Americans’ daily lives, including how we get onto airplanes and which brought on the Patriot Act.
During this announcement, UCF students weren’t confined to a grade school classroom — and neither was their reaction. Fireworks were heard being shot off after we broke the news to students on our Facebook page about bin Laden’s death. Campus was quiet with finals wrapping up, but many on campus found a place to watch Obama’s speech, whether it was on KnightNews.com’s live stream, in their dorms, or in the Student Union at Wackadoo’s sportsbar, like Brianne Barta.
She, like so many others was overcome with emotion, relieved that bin Laden is dead, but still angry over the carnage he caused — and left wishing there was a way to make him pay more.
“It’s been nearly ten years since Osama Bin Laden caused our country so much pain. I’m relieved to know that the search is finally over,” Barta told KnightNews.com, after watching the president’s speech with a small, yet passionate crowd, which broke into applause after hearing the news.
Of course, there won’t be any defiling of bin Laden’s body, and there won’t be any shrine or tombstone where his fanatic supporters who see him as a martyr can pay tribute. Bin Laden, the AP reports, was quickly buried at sea, after being handled according to Islamic practice and tradition.
Bin Laden’s death was made possible by an aerial operation US forces launched from bases the military has established in Afghanistan. But justice came with a price. Kaitlyn Michelle Freeman will never know her father. The Plant City father, Lance Cpl. Ronald D. Freeman, 25, died in Afghanistan just last Thursday while conducting combat operations in the Helmand province — on his daughter’s first birthday.
Freeman is one of 1,566 US forces who died in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. One day earlier, Pfc. Jonathan M. Villanueva, of Jacksonville, Fla., died in the Wardak province, after suffered wounds from enemy forces attacking his unit with small arms fire. He was 19 — the same age as many students finishing finals today at UCF. Some may even have known him from attending Englewood High School together, where Villanueva was a member of the ROTC.
With bin Laden’s death, the State Department has put Americans are on alert. The terrorists will likely seek revenge. And more people like Villanueva and Freeman may end up making the ultimate sacrifice so that that UCF students can go to class, their parents can go to work and children, who are still in grade school, can play outside while the military fights oversees to try and prevent another 9/11 type attack from happening on US soil.
And almost a decade after the man who implemented that strategy stood up on a pile of rubble where the Twin Towers once stood, and with a bullhorn announced, “I hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,” former President George W. Bush spoke out once again, but this time, quietly from his facebook page.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7OCgMPX2mE
“This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001,” Bush wrote yesterday.
“The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done.”
