The killing of Osama bin Laden on Sunday, May 1, 2011\u2026 or Sunday, April 24, whichever White House version of the event you choose to believe\u2026 has confronted us with a number of quandaries and anomalies.\u00a0 For example, exactly how should we feel about American special operations forces charging into the bedroom of an unarmed foreign leader in the middle of the night and shooting him to death in front of his wives and children?\u00a0 Like the British, should we consider that to be \u201cnot quite cricket?\u201d\u00a0 Or should we stop to remind ourselves of just who and what bin Laden is\u2026 er, was\u2026 and what he has done to merit our profound hatred?<\/p>\n
And what are we to make of the thousands of revelers\u2026 many college students\u2026 who took to the streets on the evening of March 2 to celebrate Osama\u2019s death\u2026 shouting, \u201cU-S-A!\u00a0 U-S-A!\u00a0 U-S-A!\u201d\u2026 amid spontaneous recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance and the singing of the National Anthem?\u00a0 Are we to take that as a genuine outpouring of patriotic fervor\u2026 something we\u2019ve rarely seen among members of the \u201cme\u201d generation?\u00a0 Or was it something else?<\/p>\n
During the Reagan Administration, Islamic terrorists attacked the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut; the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait; the U.S. Embassy Annex in Beirut; Kuwait Airways Flight 221 at Tehran; TWA Flight 847, in Beirut; the Rhein-Main Air Base, in Germany; the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro; TWA Flight 840, over Greece; Pan Am Flight 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland; and the CIA Headquarters at Langley, Virginia.\u00a0 At the time, these attacks were all seen as random acts of violence, the work of a few crazed extremists.<\/p>\n
During the Clinton Administration, Islamic terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York; two U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, one at Riyadh and the other at Dhahran; the U.S. Embassy in Kenya; the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania; and the USS Cole, in Yemen.\u00a0 These attacks were also viewed, not as terror attacks, but as law enforcement issues for our courts\u2026 although Clinton did send cruise missiles to destroy a Khartoum aspirin factory in retaliation.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was not until September 11, 2001, during the early days of George W. Bush\u2019s presidency, that Islamic terrorists finally decided that they\u2019d have to strike hard at the American homeland if they were ever to get our attention.\u00a0 On that day they attacked the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, killing more than 3,000 innocent civilians.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In these eighteen attacks, some 3,900 people, mostly American civilians, were killed.\u00a0 But it was not until the 9\/11 attacks that we were finally able to put a name and a face on the terror attacks.\u00a0 The name was al Qaeda and the face was that of Osama bin Laden.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the years following 9\/11 the attacks inspired by al Qaeda increased in number, if not in severity.\u00a0 In early June 2006, Canadian officials arrested twenty-one Muslim terrorists in connection with a plot to blow up the Canadian Parliament Building in Ottawa and to behead the Prime Minister.\u00a0 The terrorists had already acquired twice the amount of ammonium nitrate used in the blast that destroyed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On June 23, 2006, FBI agents arrested seven home-grown terrorists in Miami.\u00a0 The men had all sworn allegiance to al Qaeda and had expressed an intention to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and the FBI Building in Miami.\u00a0 The following month, FBI counterterrorism agents arrested the mastermind of a plot to blow up the tunnels beneath the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In August 2006, British authorities thwarted a plot to simultaneously blow up as many as ten Continental, United, and American Airlines planes heading to the U.S. using liquid explosives smuggled in carry-on luggage.\u00a0 As an example of their sheer madness, one Muslim couple planned to blow themselves and their infant child out of the sky.\u00a0 Their bomb components were concealed inside their baby\u2019s bottle.\u00a0 More than 25 Muslim terrorists were arrested in connection with that plot.<\/p>\n
In September 2009, undercover FBI agents arrested a 19-year-old terrorist, an illegal alien from Jordan, who planned to blow up the 720 ft. tall Fountain Place skyscraper in downtown Dallas, the fifth tallest building in the city.\u00a0 And on November 5, 2009, a U.S. Army physician, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, shot and killed 13 servicemen and wounded 30 others in a random shooting at Fort Hood, Texas\u2026 all were returning from duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
It is men such as these who were inspired by Osama bin Laden.\u00a0 However, the war on Islamic terrorism reached a milestone on May 1, 2011, when a U.S. Special Operations assault team attacked a large house in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a suburb of Islamabad.\u00a0 In the attack they shot and killed Osama bin Laden.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But how should we feel about that?\u00a0 Many Americans have expressed shock and horror that American forces would carry out such an attack\u2026 killing an enemy leader in his home, in the presence of his family, wrapping his body in a white shroud and later dumping it into the sea.\u00a0 Some have suggested that it was a criminal act.<\/p>\n
It is ironic that, on the same day that bin Laden was killed and given a respectable burial at sea, I received an email from a reader in New York who, in the weeks following 9\/11, was assigned the unthinkably gruesome task of supervising the sifting of rubble from the World Trade Center, searching for bits and pieces of human remains.\u00a0 One wonders how critics might have reacted had they been assigned to the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT) at the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Most of the victims found at Ground Zero were sent directly to the Medical Examiner\u2019s Office, but what of the thousands of human body parts mixed in with tens of thousands of tons of debris\u2026 glass shards, chunks of concrete, metal fragments, etc\u2026 delivered in a steady stream of trucks shuttling between Lower Manhattan and the landfill?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Officers and police cadets assigned to the grizzly task of sorting through the debris were often uncertain if what they found was actually a human body part.\u00a0 With all of the restaurants in the Twin Towers, a great many chicken bones from the fast food restaurants were found, as were large bones from the stock pots in the expensive restaurants such as Top of The Towers and Windows on the World.\u00a0 It was left to forensic anthropologists at the site to determine which remains were of the human variety and which were not.\u00a0 When human remains were found in the debris\u2026 body parts as small as a fingertip and as large as an entire human body\u2026 they were photographed, bagged, tagged, and sent to the Medical Examiner’s office<\/p>\n
One badly decomposed body was found; it was mashed flat, almost as if it had been run over by a steam roller.\u00a0 The victim was quickly identified by a serial number engraved on a prosthetic hip implant.\u00a0 As my reader describes the scene, \u201cThe body parts were horribly torn apart and fragmented due to people falling at or above terminal velocity (120 mph) through the tangled wires and aluminum structural beams as the buildings collapsed\u2026 it was as if the bodies had been put through a paper shredder.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
To this day, nearly half of the World Trade Center victims remain unidentified.\u00a0 The Medical Examiner’s office currently has in storage over 20,000 pieces of cryogenically frozen human remains, hoping that one day they might be identified.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And while we should never take pleasure in the death of another human being, those who cringe at the thought of American troops assassinating a foreign leader, sewing his remains into a white shroud and dumping him into the sea, need only imagine themselves sifting through the debris at the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.\u00a0 Focusing on the horrors of 9\/11 it is important to gain a bit of perspective on the sheer evil that bin Laden represented.\u00a0 As my reader explains, \u201cSadly, bin Laden received far better treatment than the unidentified remains that I found at the landfill.\u00a0 To suggest otherwise is an outrageous insult to those who died so horribly on 9\/11.\u201d<\/p>\n
One wonders how the thousands of reveling students who filled the streets in celebration of bin Laden\u2019s death might have fared at the Fresh Kills Landfill.\u00a0 Where was their latent patriotism when Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cal (Berkeley), and other liberal colleges and universities were banning military and CIA recruiters from campus?\u00a0 Where were they when ROTC programs were banned from their campuses?\u00a0 If and when it comes time for them to step forward and wear the uniforms of our U.S. fighting forces, will they have the courage to do so?\u00a0<\/p>\n
And finally, it would also be most interesting to know\u2026 if they are so high on fundamental American values\u2026 where were they when conservative speakers such as Ann Coulter and David Horowitz were being denied their 1st<\/sup> Amendment rights on college campuses?\u00a0<\/p>\n Was their sudden expression of patriotism just that\u2026 patriotism, love of country?\u00a0 Or was it something else?\u00a0 Was it perhaps just another excuse to get roaring drunk and make perfect asses of themselves in public?\u00a0 True patriots would like to know.\u00a0 We\u2019d like to think it represented a rebirth of patriotism among those who are the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the \u201cGreatest Generation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The killing of Osama bin Laden on Sunday, May 1, 2011\u2026 or Sunday, April 24, whichever White House version of the event you choose to believe\u2026 has confronted us with a number of quandaries and anomalies.\u00a0 For example, exactly how … Continue reading