Word: binning
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Last week's deadly operation took planning, patience, money, cool, stealth and extraordinarily committed operatives. It was a measure of the sophistication of the complex network of devout, high-spirited Islamic militants whom bin Laden has been assembling for almost 20 years. The big challenge here was will. Whence did the will grow to do something so atrocious...
...many ways, bin Laden's story is like that of many other Muslim extremists. There's the fanatical religiosity and the intemperate interpretation of Islam; the outrage over the dominance, particularly in the Arab world, of a secular, decadent U.S.; the indignation over U.S. support for Israel; the sense of grievance over the perceived humiliations of the Arab people at the hands of the West...
...bin Laden brings some particular, and collectively potent, elements to this equation. As a volunteer in the war that the Islamic rebels of Afghanistan fought against the Soviets in the 1980s, bin Laden had a front-row seat at an astonishing and empowering development: the defeat of a superpower by a gaggle of makeshift militias. Though the U.S., with billions of dollars in aid, helped the militias in their triumph, bin Laden soon turned on their benefactor. When U.S. troops in 1990 arrived in his sacred Saudi homeland to fight Saddam Hussein, bin Laden considered their infidel presence a desecration...
...Though bin Laden grew up wealthy, he wasn't entirely within the charmed circle in Saudi Arabia. As the son of immigrants, he didn't have quite the right credentials. His mother came from Syria by some reports, Palestine by others. His father moved to Saudi Arabia from neighboring Yemen, a desperately poor country looked down on by Saudis. If bin Laden felt any alienation or resentment about his status, it was good preparation for the break he would ultimately make with the privileged and bourgeois life that was laid out for him at birth...
...family's wealth came from the Saudi bin Laden Group, built by Osama's father Mohamed, who had four wives and 52 children. Mohamed had had the good luck of befriending the country's founder, Abdel Aziz al Saud. That relationship led to important government contracts such as refurbishing the shrines at Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest places, projects that moved young Osama deeply. Today the company, with 35,000 employees worldwide, is worth $5 billion. Osama got his share at 13 when his father died, leaving him $80 million, a fortune the son subsequently expanded to an estimated...