High Profile

Osama bin Laden was a son of the Saudi elite whose radical violent campaign to recreate a seventh-century Muslim empire redefined the threat of terrorism for the 21st century. He was killed on May 2, 2011, by American military and C.I.A. operatives who tracked him to a compound in Pakistan. President Obama announced the death in a televised address to the nation from Washington, where it was still late on the night of May 1. "Justice has been done,'' he declared. The United States had been trying to kill or capture Bin Laden since it launched an invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001. The next month, he escaped from American and Afghan troops at an Afghan mountain redoubt called Tora Bora, near the border with Pakistan. For more than nine years afterward, he remained an elusive, shadowy figure frustratingly beyond the grasp of his pursuers and thought to be hiding somewhere in Pakistan's remote tribal areas and plotting new attacks. When  he was hunted do...