Word: bins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...well-deserved one. For 50 years (December 1941 to December 1991), America had been locked in titanic, existential struggle with fascism, Nazism and then communism. We won, but half a century of mobilization can be psychologically exhausting. We needed a rest. In the '90s, we took it. What bin Laden did not understand, however, is that, while on vacation, America remained on call. His mistake was to place the call...
...graves alone were the measure, Osama bin Laden would own this year; we lost more lives on Sept. 11 than in any terrorist attack in U.S. history. And bin Laden did more than kill people. We had just packed up and stored away the century of Hitler and Stalin--both Men of the Year in their time--which we imagined had shown us the depths to which a despot could sink. To watch bin Laden sit in delight and create a skyscraper with his hand--like a child playing Here's the Church, Here's the Steeple--then slowly crumple...
...bin Laden is too small a man to get the credit for all that has happened in America in the autumn of 2001. Imagination makes him larger than he is in order that he fit his crime; yet those who have studied his work do not elevate him to the company of history's monsters, despite the monstrousness of what he has done. It is easy to turn grievance into violence; that takes no genius, just a lack of scruple and a loaded gun. The killers he dispatched were braver men than he; he has a lot of money...
...others regarded Tenet as an unlikely choice to run the war on al-Qaeda, Bush didn't see it that way. He knew Tenet was obsessed with Osama bin Laden--"almost abnormally obsessed," says former Oklahoma Senator David Boren, Tenet's mentor. Most important, Bush knew Tenet had a plan. Over the summer--"when we were getting a lot of chatter in the system about potential threats," National Security Council chief Condoleezza Rice recalled--Bush had ordered the CIA and the NSC to draw up a comprehensive proposal for breaking al-Qaeda for good. "I feel like I'm swatting...
...First, sell the mission as a campaign against terrorism that threatens every nation, lest it seem a purely American reprisal, but limit it in scope so that the U.S. isn't committed to defeating every terrorist on the planet. There would be no public offering of any "proof" against bin Laden that might undermine the military mission or compromise intelligence...