Bin Laden

When the White House sent a last-minute invitation for Asif Ali Zardari to attend the two-day NATO summit, they were taking a highly public gamble. Would sharing the spotlight with President Obama and other global leaders induce the Pakistani president to allow vital supplies to reach alliance troops fighting in Afghanistan? But long before the summit ended Monday, the answer was clear: No deal. Zardari's refusal to reopen the supply routes left a diplomatic blot on a summit that NATO sought to cast as the beginning of the end of the conflict in Afghanistan.

In the year since President Obama approved a successful raid against Osama bin Laden, public opinion has been shifting. While many Westerners still celebrate the targeted killing - along with the killing several months later of Anwar Awlaki - some are expressing doubts. European politicians, human rights lawyers and members of some East Coast think tanks have posited that these terrorists were actually more dangerous dead than alive. Death, the reasoning goes, martyred the leaders, thus immortalizing their ideas and appeal.

Re "A year later, raid on Bin Laden becomes campaign fodder," May 1 In 2007, Mitt Romney said he wouldn't spend billions of dollars tracking down one man. During his second term as president,George W. Bush said he didn't know where Osama bin Laden was and didn't spend much time thinking about it. By the time Barack Obama was elected president, the trail to Bin Laden had long gone cold. In 2009, his first order to Leon Panetta, then his new CIA director, was to make the killing or capture of Bin Laden the top priority in the war against Al Qaeda.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A Pakistani doctor who led a phony vaccination campaign aimed at helping the CIA pinpoint Osama bin Laden's whereabouts was convicted of treason Wednesday and sentenced to 33 years in prison, a decision that is likely to further fray Washington's fragile relations with Islamabad. U.S. officials have been seeking the release of Shakeel Afridi since his arrest by Pakistani authorities after the secret American commando raid that killed the Al Qaeda leader in his sprawling compound in the garrison city of Abbottabad a year ago. In January, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told CBS' "60 Minutes" that Afridi had provided intelligence that assisted the raid and criticized Pakistan's arrest of someone involved in helping track down the world's most wanted man. From the start, however, Pakistani authorities have regarded Afridi as a traitor and have ignored Washington's calls for his release.

After landing by helicopter at the Pakistani compound housing Osama bin Laden early Monday, local time, the U.S. special operations team tasked with capturing or killing the Al Qaeda leader found itself in an almost continuous gun battle. For the next 40 minutes, the team cleared the two buildings within the fortified compound in Abbottabad, north of Islamabad, trying to reach Bin Laden and his family, who lived on the second and third floors of the largest structure, senior Defense Department and intelligence officials said Monday.

It looks like Osama bin Laden has dropped out of Obama's campaign speech. In his speech Monday night at a DNC fund-raising event, Obama mentioned that his administration has made progress against Al Qaeda, but he doesn't mention Bin Laden specifically. "We have gone after Al Qaeda relentlessly — and made America safer in the process," he said to applause, according to the White House transcript. Contrast that to his speech on May 10 at a fundraiser in Austin, Texas, where he said: "And because of the extraordinary bravery of the men and women who wear this nation's uniform and the outstanding work of our intelligence agencies, Osama bin Laden will never again threaten the United States of America.

A CIA-led team killed Osama Bin Laden at a compound inside Pakistan Sunday and recovered his body, bringing a close to the world's highest-profile manhunt after a decade-long search, President Obama announced to the world Sunday night. "Justice has been done," the President said solemnly in a hastily-arranged late night TV address from the East Room of the White House. Bin Laden, he said, "murdered thousands of innocent men, women and children" and his death was "the most significant achievement to date" in the U.S. war against the al Qaeda, terrorist network that bin Laden founded, led and inspired.

With Sunday night's announcement, President Obama concluded one of the most protracted, tense and unhappy periods in U.S. history. For a decade, the perpetrator of an atrocious attack on the American people eluded retribution. Now, finally, he is dead. In disclosing Osama bin Laden's death, the president was impeccably clear about America's interests in the pursuit of this despicable enemy of the United States. Bin Laden, he said, had continued plotting attacks long after 9/11, and his death "marks the most significant achievement to date" in the effort to defeat Al Qaeda.

It might seem churlish to second-guess a military operation that removed a master terrorist from the face of the Earth. But conflicting statements from the White House about whether Osama bin Laden was armed during the raid on his compound raise the question of whether the United States ever intended to do anything other than kill him, and if not, whether we should find that troubling. In his statement to the nation Sunday, President Obama said Bin Laden was killed after a firefight, the implication being that he exchanged gunfire with American commandos.

If conservatives had any doubts that Hollywood was a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd did her best to dispel them in a recent piece. Claiming that the White House was giving "top-level access" to filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal as they research their upcoming movie about the killing of Osama bin Laden, Dowd wrote that "the White House had outsourced the job of manning up the president's image to Hollywood" and that the film's scheduled release date — one month before the 2012 presidential election — was "perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher.

WASHINGTON - In the months after the U.S. militarymission that killed Osama bin Laden, Pentagon officials met with Hollywood filmmakers and gave them special access in an effort to influence the creation of a film about the operation, newly released documents show. Emails and meeting transcripts obtained from the Pentagon and CIA through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch suggest that officials went out of their way to assist the filmmakers, while trying to keep their cooperation from becoming public.

WASHINGTON -- In the months after the U.S. military mission that killed Osama bin Laden, Pentagon officials met with Hollywood filmmakers and gave them special access in an effort to influence the creation of a film about the operation, newly released documents show. Emails and meeting transcripts obtained from the Pentagon and CIA through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the watchdog group Judicial Watch suggest that officials went out of their way to assist the filmmakers, while trying to avoid the public learning of their cooperation.

Upcoming films produced by Megan Ellison "Lawless" A Prohibition-era bootlegging drama based on the novel "The Wettest County in the World. " Director: John Hillcoat ("The Road") Stars: Jessica Chastain, Tom Hardy, Shia LaBoeuf, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce, Mia Wasikowska Debuts: May 19 (Cannes Film Festival); Aug. 31 (in U.S.) "Killing Them Softly" Gritty drama about a mob enforcer. Based on the novel "Cogan's Trade. " Director: Andrew Dominik ("The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford")

Last week, my colleagues and I did something defense attorneys rarely do: We asked the government to file charges against our client. And because it seems unlikely the case will ever make it to an American courtroom, we have asked that it be heard in the nation's flawed military commission system. Abu Zubaydah, our client, was an early poster child for the Bush administration's torture regime. He was the first prisoner held in a secret "black site" and the first to be tortured using "enhanced interrogation" techniques.

We do not run many letters to the editor responding to other letters. With such a small piece of newsprint real estate to allocate among the hundreds of letters sent each week to letters@latimes.com , priority is given to submissions responding to Times Op-Ed articles, editorials and news stories. But this isn't to say that letters responding to what other readers say don't come in. This was especially true this week, when the letters page carried reader responses addressing hot-button issues such as same-sex marriage, the one-year anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death and more.

Vice President Joe Biden said Sunday morning that American national security wouldn't be as strong if Republican Mitt Romney were president, based on his recent assertion that Russia is the country's “No. 1 geopolitical foe.” “If that's his prism through which he views our national security interests, I would say it would not be as strong,” Biden told David Gregory on “Meet the Press.” The vice president also questioned whether Romney would have authorized the killing of Osama bin Laden -- not because Romney wouldn't have acted the same way on the intelligence about the terrorist's location, he said, but because he wouldn't have gotten the intelligence in the first place.

Re "A truly loopy tax loophole," Column, May 3 It's deja vu all over again. A provision of Proposition 24 on the November 2010 ballot would have eliminated the option that multi-state businesses have to choose between two tax formulas. Proposition 24 was defeated. Sandra Wolber Granada Hills ALSO: Letters: Getting Bin Laden Postscript: An anti-Vatican bias? Letters: A truth filter for political ads

Re "A year later, raid on Bin Laden becomes campaign fodder," May 1 In 2007, Mitt Romney said he wouldn't spend billions of dollars tracking down one man. During his second term as president,George W. Bush said he didn't know where Osama bin Laden was and didn't spend much time thinking about it. By the time Barack Obama was elected president, the trail to Bin Laden had long gone cold. In 2009, his first order to Leon Panetta, then his new CIA director, was to make the killing or capture of Bin Laden the top priority in the war against Al Qaeda.