The Cost of bin Laden: $3 Trillion Over 15 Years

Osama bin Laden cost America more than any villain, ever—which is exactly the way he wanted it.

by Tim Fernholz and Jim Tankersley
Thursday, May 5, 2011 | 2:53 p.m.
National Journal

The most expensive public enemy in American history died Sunday from two bullets.

As we mark Osama bin Laden’s death, what’s striking is how much he cost our nation—and how little we’ve gained from our fight against him. By conservative estimates, bin Laden cost the United States at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years, counting the disruptions he wrought on the domestic economy, the wars and heightened security triggered by the terrorist attacks he engineered, and the direct efforts to hunt him down.

What do we have to show for that tab? Two wars that continue to occupy 150,000 troops and tie up a quarter of our defense budget; a bloated homeland-security apparatus that has at times pushed the bounds of civil liberty; soaring oil prices partially attributable to the global war on bin Laden’s terrorist network; and a chunk of our mounting national debt, which threatens to hobble the economy unless lawmakers compromise on an unprecedented deficit-reduction deal.

All of that has not given us, at least not yet, anything close to the social or economic advancements produced by the battles against America’s costliest past enemies. Defeating the Confederate army brought the end of slavery and a wave of standardization—in railroad gauges and shoe sizes, for example—that paved the way for a truly national economy. Vanquishing Adolf Hitler ended the Great Depression and ushered in a period of booming prosperity and hegemony. Even the massive military escalation that marked the Cold War standoff against Joseph Stalin and his Russian successors produced landmark technological breakthroughs that revolutionized the economy.

Perhaps the biggest economic silver lining from our bin Laden spending, if there is one, is the accelerated development of unmanned aircraft. That’s our $3 trillion windfall, so far: Predator drones. “We have spent a huge amount of money which has not had much effect on the strengthening of our military, and has had a very weak impact on our economy,” says Linda Bilmes, a lecturer at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who coauthored a book on the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Certainly, in the course of the fight against bin Laden, the United States escaped another truly catastrophic attack on our soil. Al-Qaida, though not destroyed, has been badly hobbled. “We proved that we value our security enough to incur some pretty substantial economic costs en route to protecting it,” says Michael O’Hanlon, a national-security analyst at the Brookings Institution.

But that willingness may have given bin Laden exactly what he wanted. While the terrorist leader began his war against the United States believing it to be a “paper tiger” that would not fight, by 2004 he had already shifted his strategic aims, explicitly comparing the U.S. fight to the Afghan incursion that helped bankrupt the Soviet Union during the Cold War. “We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,” bin Laden said in a taped statement. Only the smallest sign of al-Qaida would “make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations.” Considering that we’ve spent one-fifth of a year’s gross domestic product—more than the entire 2008 budget of the United States government—responding to his 2001 attacks, he may have been onto something.
THE SCORECARD

Other enemies throughout history have extracted higher gross costs, in blood and in treasure, from the United States. The Civil War and World War II produced higher casualties and consumed larger shares of our economic output. As an economic burden, the Civil War was America’s worst cataclysm relative to the size of the economy. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service estimates that the Union and Confederate armies combined to spend $80 million, in today’s dollars, fighting each other. That number might seem low, but economic historians who study the war say the total financial cost was exponentially higher: more like $280 billion in today’s dollars when you factor in disruptions to trade and capital flows, along with the killing of 3 to 4 percent of the population. The war “cost about double the gross national product of the United States in 1860,” says John Majewski, who chairs the history department at the University of California (Santa Barbara). “From that perspective, the war on terror isn’t going to compare.”

On the other hand, these earlier conflicts—for all their human cost—also furnished major benefits to the U.S. economy. After entering the Civil War as a loose collection of regional economies, America emerged with the foundation for truly national commerce; the first standardized railroad system sprouted from coast to coast, carrying goods across the union; and textile mills began migrating from the Northeast to the South in search of cheaper labor, including former slaves who had joined the workforce. The fighting itself sped up the mechanization of American agriculture: As farmers flocked to the battlefield, the workers left behind adopted new technologies to keep harvests rolling in with less labor.

World War II defense spending cost $4.4 trillion. At its peak, it sucked up nearly 40 percent of GDP, according to the Congressional Research Service. It was an unprecedented national mobilization, says Chris Hellman, a defense budget analyst at the National Priorities Project. One in 10 Americans—some 12 million people—donned a uniform during the war.

But the payoff was immense. The war machine that revved up to defeat Germany and Japan powered the U.S. out of the Great Depression and into an unparalleled stretch of postwar growth. Jet engines and nuclear power spread into everyday lives. A new global economic order—forged at Bretton Woods, N.H., by the Allies in the waning days of the war—opened a floodgate of benefits through international trade. Returning soldiers dramatically improved the nation’s skills and education level, thanks to the GI Bill, and they produced a baby boom that would vastly expand the workforce.

U.S. military spending totaled nearly $19 trillion throughout the four-plus decades of Cold War that ensued, as the nation escalated an arms race with the Soviet Union. Such a huge infusion of cash for weapons research spilled over to revolutionize civilian life, yielding quantum leaps in supercomputing and satellite technology, not to mention the advent of the Internet.

Unlike any of those conflicts, the wars we are fighting today were kick-started by a single man. While it is hard to imagine World War II without Hitler, that conflict pitted nations against each other. (Anyway, much of the cost to the United States came from the war in the Pacific.) And it’s absurd to pin the Civil War, World War I, or the Cold War on any single individual. Bin Laden’s mystique (and his place on the FBI’s most-wanted list) made him—and the wars he drew us into—unique.

By any measure, bin Laden inflicted a steep toll on America. His 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa caused Washington to quadruple spending on diplomatic security worldwide the following year—and to expand it from $172 million to $2.2 billion over the next decade. The 2000 bombing of the USS Cole caused $250 million in damages.

Al-Qaida’s assault against the United States on September 11, 2001, was the highest-priced disaster in U.S. history. Economists estimate that the combined attacks cost the economy $50 billion to $100 billion in lost activity and growth, or about 0.5 percent to 1 percent of GDP, and caused about $25 billion in property damage. The stock market plunged and was still down nearly 13 percentage points a year later, although it has more than made up the value since.

The greater expense we can attribute to bin Laden comes from policymakers’ response to 9/11. The invasion of Afghanistan was clearly a reaction to al-Qaida’s attacks. It is unlikely that the Bush administration would have invaded Iraq if 9/11 had not ushered in a debate about Islamic extremism and weapons of mass destruction. Those two wars grew into a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign that cost $1.4 trillion in the past decade—and will cost hundreds of billions more. The government borrowed the money for those wars, adding hundreds of billions in interest charges to the U.S. debt.

Spending on Iraq and Afghanistan peaked at 4.8 percent of GDP in 2008, nowhere near the level of economic mobilization in some past conflicts but still more than the entire federal deficit that year. “It’s a much more verdant, prosperous, peaceful world than it was 60 years ago,” and nations spend proportionally far less on their militaries today, says S. Brock Blomberg, a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California who specializes in the economics of terrorism. “So as bad as bin Laden is, he’s not nearly as bad as Hitler, Mussolini, [and] the rest of them.”

Yet bin Laden produced a ripple effect. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have created a world in which even non-war-related defense spending has grown by 50 percent since 2001. As the U.S. military adopted counterinsurgency doctrine to fight guerrilla wars, it also continued to increase its ability to fight conventional battles, boosting spending for weapons from national-missile defense and fighter jets to tanks and long-range bombers. Then there were large spending increases following the overhaul of America’s intelligence agencies and homeland-security programs. Those transformations cost at least another $1 trillion, if not more, budget analysts say, though the exact cost is still unknown. Because much of that spending is classified or spread among agencies with multiple missions, a breakdown is nearly impossible.

It’s similarly difficult to assess the opportunity cost of the post-9/11 wars—the kinds of productive investments of fiscal and human resources that we might have made had we not been focused on combating terrorism through counterinsurgency. Blomberg says that the response to the attacks has essentially wiped out the “peace dividend” that the United States began to reap when the Cold War ended. After a decade of buying fewer guns and more butter, we suddenly ramped up our gun spending again, with borrowed money.

The price of the war-fighting and security responses to bin Laden account for more than 15 percent of the national debt incurred in the last decade—a debt that is changing the way our military leaders perceive risk. “Our national debt is our biggest national-security threat,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters last June.

All of those costs, totaled together, reach at least $3 trillion. And that’s just the cautious estimate. Stiglitz and Bilmes believe that the Iraq conflict alone cost that much. They peg the total economic costs of both wars at $4 trillion to $6 trillion, Bilmes says. That includes fallout from the sharp increase in oil prices since 2003, which is largely attributable to growing demand from developing countries and current unrest in the Middle East but was also spurred in some part by the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Bilmes and Stiglitz also count part of the 2008 financial crisis among the costs, theorizing that oil price hikes injected liquidity in global economies battling slowdowns in growth—and that helped push up housing prices and contributed to the bubble.

Most important, the fight against bin Laden has not produced the benefits that accompanied previous conflicts. The military escalation of the past 10 years did not stimulate the economy as the war effort did in the 1940s—with the exception of a few large defense contractors—in large part because today’s operations spend far less on soldiers and far more on fuel. Meanwhile, our national-security spending no longer drives innovation. The experts who spoke with National Journal could name only a few advancements spawned by the fight against bin Laden, including Predator drones and improved backup systems to protect information technology from a terrorist attack or other disaster. “The spin-off effects of military technology were demonstrably more apparent in the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s,” says Gordon Adams, a national-security expert at American Univeristy.

Another reason that so little economic benefit has come from this war is that it has produced less—not more—stability around the world. Stable countries, with functioning markets governed by the rule of law, make better trading partners; it’s easier to start a business, or tap national resources, or develop new products in times of tranquility than in times of strife. “If you can successfully pursue a military campaign and bring stability at the end of it, there is an economic benefit,” says economic historian Joshua Goldstein of the University of Massachusetts. “If we stabilized Libya, that would have an economic benefit.”

Even the psychological boost from bin Laden’s death seems muted by historical standards. Imagine the emancipation of the slaves. Victory over the Axis powers gave Americans a sense of euphoria and limitless possibility. O’Hanlon says, “I take no great satisfaction in his death because I’m still amazed at the devastation and how high a burden he placed on us.” It is “more like a relief than a joy that I feel.” Majewski adds, “Even in a conflict like the Civil War or World War II, there’s a sense of tragedy but of triumph, too. But the war on terror … it’s hard to see what we get out of it, technologically or institutionally.”
BIN LADEN’S LEGACY

What we are left with, after bin Laden, is a lingering bill that was exacerbated by decisions made in a decade-long campaign against him. We borrowed money to finance the war on terrorism rather than diverting other national-security funding or raising taxes. We expanded combat operations to Iraq before stabilizing Afghanistan, which in turn led to the recent reescalation of the American commitment there. We tolerated an unsupervised national-security apparatus, allowing it to grow so inefficient that, as The Washington Post reported in a major investigation last year, 1,271 different government institutions are charged with counterterrorism missions (51 alone track terrorism financing), which produce some 50,000 intelligence reports each year, many of which are simply not read.

We have also shelled out billions of dollars in reconstruction funding and walking-around money for soldiers, with little idea of whether it has even helped foreigners, much less the United States; independent investigations suggest as much as $23 billion is unaccounted for in Iraq alone. “We can’t account for where any of it goes—that’s the great tragedy in all of this,” Hellman says. “The Pentagon cannot now and has never passed an audit—and, to me, that’s just criminal.”

It’s worth repeating that the actual cost of bin Laden’s September 11 attacks was between $50 billion and $100 billion. That number could have been higher, says Adam Rose, coordinator for economics at the University of Southern California’s National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, but for the resilience of the U.S. economy and the quick response of policymakers to inject liquidity and stimulate consumer spending. But the cost could also have been much lower, he says, if consumers hadn’t paid a fear premium—shying away from air travel and tourism in the aftermath of the attacks. “Ironically,” he says, “we as Americans had more to do with the bottom-line outcome than the terrorist attack itself, on both the positive side and the negative side.”

The same is true of the nation’s decision, for so many reasons, to spend at least $3 trillion responding to bin Laden’s attacks. More than actual security, we bought a sense of action in the face of what felt like an existential threat. We staved off another attack on domestic soil. Our debt load was creeping up already, thanks to the early waves stages of baby-boomer retirements, but we also hastened a fiscal mess that has begun, in time, to fulfill bin Laden’s vision of a bankrupt America. If left unchecked, our current rate of deficit spending would add $9 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. That’s three Osamas, right there.

Although Bin Laden is buried in the sea, other Islamist extremists are already vying to take his place. In time, new enemies, foreign and domestic, will rise to challenge America. What they will cost us, far more than we realize, is our choice.

The small footprint that eliminated bin Laden

By George F. Will,
The Washington Post
Monday, May 2, 12:14 PM

Osama bin Laden’s death was announced by the president on May 1, a date that once had worldwide significance on the revolutionary calendar of communism, which was America’s absorbing national security preoccupation prior to Islamic terrorism. Times change.

Barack Obama, in his pitch-perfect address informing the nation that bin Laden is as dead as communism — never mind the cadaverous Cuban and North Korean regimes — rightly stressed that this is “the most significant achievement to date” against al-Qaeda, but that it “does not mark the end of” our effort to defeat that amorphous entity. Perhaps, however, America can use this occasion to draw a deep breath and some pertinent conclusions.

Many salient facts about the tracking of terrorism’s most prolific killer to his lair — some lair: not a remote cave but an urban compound — must remain shrouded in secrecy, for now. But one surmise seems reasonable: bin Laden was brought down by intelligence gathering that more resembles excellent police work than a military operation.

Granted, in nations as violent as Afghanistan and Pakistan, the line between military operations and police work is blurry, and military and other forms of intelligence gathering cannot be disentangled. Still, the enormous military footprint in Afghanistan, next door to bin Laden’s Pakistan refuge, seems especially disproportionate in the wake of his elimination by a small cadre of specialists.

Jim Lacey of the Marine Corps War College notes that Gen. David Petraeus has said there are perhaps about 100 al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. “Did anyone,” Lacey asks, “do the math?” There are, he says, more than 140,000 coalition soldiers in Afghanistan, or 1,400 for every al-Qaeda fighter. It costs about $1 million a year to deploy and support every soldier — or up to $140 billion, or close to $1.5 billion a year, for each al-Qaeda fighter. “In what universe do we find strategists to whom this makes sense?”

There remains much more to al-Qaeda than bin Laden, and there are many more tentacles to the terrorism threat than al-Qaeda and its affiliates. So “the long war” must go on. But perhaps such language is bewitching our minds, because this is not essentially war.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry received much derision for his belief (as expressed in a Jan. 29 debate in South Carolina) that although the war on terror will be “occasionally military,” it is “primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world.” Kerry, as paraphrased by the New York Times Magazine of Oct. 10, thought “many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror.” True then; even more obviously true now.

Again: Granted, the distinction between military and law enforcement facets is not a bright line. But neither is it a distinction without a difference. And the more we couch our thinking in military categories, the more we open ourselves to misadventures like the absurd and deepening one in Libya.

There, our policy — if what seem to be hourly improvisations can be dignified as a policy — began as a no-fly zone to protect civilians from wanton violence. Seven weeks later, our policy is to decapitate the government by long-distance assassination and to intensify a civil war in that tribal society, in the name of humanitarianism. What makes this particularly surreal is that it is being done by NATO.

Unpack the acronym: North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO was created in 1949 to protect Western Europe from the Red Army. Its purpose was, in Lord Ismay’s famous formulation, “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.” NATO, which could long ago have unfurled a “mission accomplished” banner, has now become an instrument of addlepated mischief.

This is an episode of presidential malpractice. Obama has allowed NATO to be employed for the advancement of a half-baked doctrine (R2P — “responsibility to protect”), a quarter-baked rationalization (was it just in March that Hillary Clinton discovered that a vital U.S. national interest required the removal of Moammar Gaddafi because he “is a man who has no conscience”?) and an unworthy national agenda (France’s pursuit of grandeur on the cheap).

When this Libyan mistake is finished, America needs a national debate about whether NATO should be finished. Times change.

georgewill@washpost.com

How the U.S. found and finished Bin Laden

By David Ignatius,
The Washington Post
Monday, May 2, 12:58 PM

The assault on Osama bin Laden — as quick and ruthless an operation as you would see in any spy movie — shows that the CIA and the military’s super-secret Joint Special Operations Command have combined to create what amounts to a highly effective killing machine.

The shorthand for these operations is “find, fix, finish.” The CIA and other intelligence agencies typically provide the first two, and the bin Laden attack shows that this process can take years of patient detective work. JSOC warriors then come in for the finish.

A reconstruction of how this operation was put together shows how the pieces of America’s counterterrorism policy fit together. It also illuminates one of the CIA’s biggest puzzles, which is whether it can work effectively with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. The answer seems to be “sometimes.”

The trail that led to bin Laden’s hideout in the town of Abbottabad, about 75 miles north of Islamabad, began between 2002 and 2004 with the CIA’s interrogation of al-Qaeda “high-value targets” at secret CIA sites overseas. Several detainees mentioned the “nom de guerre,” or nickname, of one of bin Laden’s couriers.

Some of the detainees who confirmed the courier’s nickname were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the CIA’s formal name for what is now widely viewed as torture. This adds a moral ambiguity to a story that is otherwise one of triumphal retribution and justice.

The CIA spent years trying to figure out the courier’s identity. Using sources that U.S. officials won’t discuss, the agency finally discovered the courier’s real name in 2007, along with the important fact that he had a brother. In early 2009, a team from the agency’s counterterrorism center traced him to a compound in Abbottabad that he shared with the brother.

Pakistan was told little about the bin Laden manhunt, for fear that the information would leak. But a U.S. official said the Pakistanis offered some help. “They provided information that helped us identify where one of the brothers might be located,” this official said. He added: “They didn’t tell us he was in Abbottabad, but their information allowed us to track him there.”

Now the agency had a suspect location but no firm idea bin Laden was there. Surveillance confirmed that this was an unusual compound. The surrounding walls were up to 18 feet high, and even the balconies had seven-foot walls. And the compound maintained unusual security: It had no telephone or Internet service, and trash was regularly burned.

As the CIA continued its surveillance, analysts concluded that another family was secretly living in the compound, along with the two brothers. The number of family members and other details matched bin Laden’s likely family group. This crucial “circumstantial” evidence was briefed to President Obama last August, says a U.S. official.

This year, JSOC began preparing the “finish” operation, using members of Seal Team 6, its most elite counterterrorism unit. Obama was given a choice between bombing the compound or staging the raid. Obama opted for the latter, believing the United States needed to capture bin Laden’s body.

One of the mysteries is whether the Pakistani government knew all along who was hiding in Abbottabad. It is hardly remote territory: A Pakistani military college is two miles away. A senior U.S. official says the CIA has carefully examined this question but has “zero evidence” of Pakistani government knowledge of bin Laden’s location. That’s not quite the same as saying for certain that the Pakistanis didn’t know, and it allows the ISI and CIA to continue working as sometime partners.

CIA Director Leon Panetta, who directed the operation, told Pakistan nothing until the helicopters had left Abbottabad to return to Afghanistan. But U.S. officials describe the subsequent Pakistani reaction as helpful. Pakistani officials urged Obama to make his unusual late-night announcement so the Pakistani public would immediately know the U.S. had attacked bin Laden, not a Pakistani target. And Islamabad promised to try to mitigate Pakistani popular anger, which officials did by issuing a supportive statement Monday.

Does bin Laden’s demise mean the death of al-Qaeda? CIA analysts won’t go that far. But they have concluded that the operation “will accelerate its demise,” and that the battered organization is now at a “tipping point” that could lead to collapse.

The hidden trophy of Sunday’s raid: The JSOC team captured intelligence materials from the compound that might reveal the location of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the organization’s new commander. “That’s where we’re going next,” says one U.S. official involved in planning the operation.

davidignatius@washpost.com

Bin Laden discovered ‘hiding in plain sight’

By Greg Miller and and Joby Warrick,
The Washington Post
Monday, May 2, 9:25 PM

Half an hour had passed on the ground, but the American commandos raiding Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideaway had yet to find their long-sought target.

Two of bin Laden’s protectors were already dead, shot by the Navy SEALs carrying out the raid, and one of the U.S. helicopters sat crippled in the courtyard. Pakistan’s military, which had been kept in the dark about the operation, was scrambling to respond to reports of explosions and gunfire at the compound.

The commandos swept methodically through the one-acre compound’s main building, clearing one room and then another as they made their way to the upper floors where they expected to find bin Laden. As they did so, Obama administration officials in the White House Situation Room listened to the SEAL team’s conversations over secure lines.

“The minutes passed like days,” said John O. Brennan, the administration’s chief counterterrorism adviser. “It was probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time, I think, in the lives of the people who were assembled.”

Finally, shortly before 2 a.m. in Pakistan, the commandos burst into an upstairs room. Inside, an armed bin Laden took cover behind one of his wives, Brennan said. With a burst of gunfire, one of the longest and costliest manhunts in modern history was over.

The operation, which was planned for months but hidden from all but a tiny circle of administration officials, marked the culmination of a search often seemingly so futile that top U.S. intelligence officials would answer questions about bin Laden’s whereabouts with a helpless shrug.

It was a search that employed Predator drones, sophisticated signal interception equipment, networks of informants, and teams of analysts who scrutinized every video and audio recording from the al-Qaeda leader for inadvertent clues.

In the end, “he was more or less hiding in plain sight,” a senior U.S. intelligence official said. “The only resident of the compound that was taken from the site was Osama bin Laden. He died — almost certainly — from a bullet to the head.”

For years, Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts were a guessing game, an unknown destination at the end of a trail that had gone utterly cold. But over the past year, U.S. spy agencies finally narrowed the circle by homing in on a relatively mundane target — a small network of couriers thought to be bin Laden’s only point of contact to the outside world.

One courier in particular led them to a newly built residence north of Islamabad. When American analysts scrutinized the place, “we were shocked by what we saw,” a senior Obama administration official said.

The compound’s main building was three stories tall but had few windows facing outside. The facility appeared to be worth at least $1 million, but had no telephone or Internet connections. Its 12-to-18-foot security walls were topped by barbed wire.

It was far from the tribal areas where lower-level militants dodge Predator strikes. Indeed, the compound was a short distance from Pakistan’s military academy. U.S. documents released by the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy Web site describe plans to send U.S. special operations soldiers to Abbottabad in 2008 to train Pakistani troops. In contrast to the legend of al-Qaeda and its founder, bin Laden was not hiding in a cave.

Much about the U.S. operation remained shrouded in secrecy Monday. But U.S. officials provided new details on the chronology of events leading up to the raid, describing high-level meetings at the White House as well as daring operations on the ground.

A crucial break appears to have come on May 2, 2005, when Pakistani special forces arrested a senior al-Qaeda operative known as Abu Faraj al-Libi, who had been designated bin Laden’s “official messenger” to others within the organization. Libi was later turned over to the CIA and held at a “black site” prison where he was subjected to the harsh methods that the Bush administration termed “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Libi and other detainees pointed CIA interrogators to another messenger with close ties to the al-Qaeda leader. U.S. officials said they started only with the mystery courier’s nom de guerre, and that it took four years to uncover his actual identity, his approximate location in Pakistan and ultimately the compound where bin Laden was found.

Obama was first made aware of the potential breakthrough last September, as CIA analysts grasped the significance of the succession of clues. On March 14, Obama held the first of five National Security Council meetings in the span of a month devoted to the question of whether and how to target the newly discovered site.

“We weren’t certain in August 2010 that bin Laden was there,” said the senior U.S. intelligence official. “Earlier this year, our confidence level grew much higher.”

That confidence grew in large part because analysts monitored the compound so closely that they came to know its daily rhythms and the identities of its residents. Analysts concluded it was built to hide “someone of significance,” and that a third family was living on the floors above the courier and his brother.

It remains unclear when bin Laden first arrived, but officials said that the compound was under near-constant scrutiny by the United States, and that it appears the al-Qaeda leader rarely — if ever — ventured outside.

Indeed, U.S. officials said the timing of the raid was not driven by worry that bin Laden was about to leave, but by the accumulation of confidence that their intelligence on his location was dead on.

On Thursday afternoon, Obama gathered his senior national security team in the Situation Room for a final review of the operation, according to one member present who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

Three options were under consideration: The first was a raid using Special Forces, but Obama was also asked to consider a strike from a “standoff platform,” most likely a drone. The third — to wait for more definitive intelligence — would have sounded distressingly familiar to a prior generation of officials who had to explain why there had been such reluctance to pursue bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Everyone, in going around the table, began by saying, ‘Well, this is a very tough call,’ ” a senior administration official said. Obama, the official said, told the group, “I’m not going to give you my answer now.”

It wasn’t until 8 a.m. Friday that Obama, in a meeting with national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon, his deputy Denis McDonough, chief of staff William Daley, and Brennan, told the group to move ahead.

He then boarded Marine One, waiting for him on the South Lawn, to carry him on the first leg of a trip to tornado-ravaged Alabama.

The Navy SEAL commandos picked for the mission had trained for weeks, practicing daily at a such a precise replica of the compound that they came to know every wall and external feature, as well as where every occupant was likely to be found. The rehearsals also covered a range of scenarios, including the possibility that bin Laden would try to surrender. So the SEAL team members practiced how to take him prisoner, according a military official briefed on the plan. Using Arabic commands, the insertion team would offer bin Laden a chance to give up, and would fire only if he resisted.

“As much as they may have wanted to see him dead, they were ready to offer him a chance to give up,” said the official, who agreed to speak about the mission on the condition of anonymity.

In the end, bin Laden showed no interest in being captured alive.

The SEAL team flew from Afghanistan into Abbottabad aboard two Black Hawk helicopters, U.S. officials said. The raid created enough of a commotion that a Pakistani resident of the city posted a series of tweets describing the sounds of helicopters and explosions.

The most serious stumble occurred at the start: one of the helicopters had a mechanical failure and tumbled into a courtyard, its tail clipping a 12-foot wall. Navy SEALs who were supposed to be dropped safely outside the perimeter were scrambling for cover in bin Laden’s yard.

“Seeing that helicopter in a place and in a condition that it wasn’t supposed to be — that, at least for me and I know for the other people in the room, was the concern,” Brennan said.

A third helicopter, a Chinook, was sent to the scene for emergency support. Meanwhile, the team dropped outside the compound joined the unit that from the the damaged helicopter and pressed ahead, exchanging fire with the courier and his brother until both men were fatally down.

The commandos moved into the interior of the building, and finally reached bin Laden’s upstairs living quarters after nearly 40 minutes on the ground. What words if any were exchanged between the Americans and the Saudi-born terrorist are not publicly known, but the SEALs used the code word “Geronimo” to inform their commanders that they had found the target.

“The woman presumed to be his wife . . . was shielding bin Laden,” Brennan said. She was “in the line of fire,” he added, and was killed, along with one of bin Laden’s adult sons. Other statements from officials suggested the woman killed was not married to bin Laden.

The al-Qaeda leader was shot at at least once in the head and died instantly, U.S. officials said.

News footage from inside the rooms of the compound showed the aftermath of a ferocious struggle, with blood-soaked carpets and overturned furniture. ABC News, which obtained the footage, said computer equipment appeared to have been seized in the raid. A senior U.S. intelligence official confirmed that the SEAL team seized material from the compound that was being scrubbed for possible leads to other terrorist suspects.

All told, four men and one woman lay dead. Only the corpse of bin Laden was carried away as the commandos made their way to a designated collection point outside the complex, and boarded helicopters for the return flight to Afghanistan.

Only after slipping out of Pakistani airspace did Obama call Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, to inform him of the U.S. military raid 35 miles, as the crow flies, from the Pakistani capital.

A series of top secret briefings at the White House on Sunday afternoon conveyed, with rising certainty, news of the operation’s success. At 7:01 pm, the president was told there was a “high probability” that bin Laden was dead.

Staff writers Peter Finn and Scott Wilson and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Osama bin Laden buried at sea after being killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan

By Philip Rucker, Scott Wilson and Anne E. Kornblut,
The Washington Post
Monday, May , 9:36 AM

Osama bin Laden, the long-hunted al-Qaeda leader and chief architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, was killed by U.S. forces Sunday in what officials described as a surgical raid on his luxury hideout in Pakistan.

In a rare Sunday night address from the East Room of the White House, President Obama said a small team of U.S. personnel attacked a compound Sunday in Pakistan’s Abbottabad Valley, where bin Laden had been hiding since at least last summer. During a firefight, the U.S. team killed bin Laden, 54, and took custody of his body in what Obama called “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaeda.”

The killing of the terrorism mastermind who had eluded U.S. forces for nearly a decade drew a spontaneous, cheering crowd outside the White House gates and at New York’s Ground Zero, the site of al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.

“We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies,” a somber Obama said in his nine-minute statement that aired live on television worldwide. “We will be true to the values that make us who we are. And on nights like this one, we can say to families who have lost loved ones to al-Qaeda’s terror: Justice has been done.”

Bin Laden’s killing will provide a clear moment of victory for Obama at a time of deep political turmoil overseas that is upending long-standing U.S. policy in much of the Muslim world, particularly the Middle East.

It also comes nearly 10 years after bin Laden orchestrated the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil, when al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked three passenger jets and crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and crashed a fourth jet in rural Shanksville, Pa.

“Today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people,” Obama said. “The cause of securing our country is not complete, but tonight we are once again reminded that America can do whatever it is we set our mind to. That is the story of our history.”

The discovery that bin Laden had been hiding in a well-populated part of Pakistan, rather than a remote location, raised new questions about the extent to which Pakistan is cooperating with the United States in combating terrorism.

U.S. forces flew to bin Laden’s hideout in helicopters about 1 a.m. Monday (late Sunday afternoon in Washington). Bin Laden was shot in the head after he and his guards resisted the U.S. attackers, the Associated Press reported. U.S. personnel identified him by facial recognition.

A U.S. official said bin Laden’s body was quickly transported away from Pakistan and “buried at sea,” in part because the U.S. government did not want an accessible gravesite that could become a shrine to bin Laden’s followers. The official declined to identify which body of water the corpse was taken to, or provide further details on how it was transported or handled.

The official said the body was buried “in accordance with Islamic tradition,” meaning within 24 hours of bin Laden’s death. No information was available as to whether Muslim prayers were recited or the body was ritually washed, as is usually required by Islamic law. In general, burial at sea means tipping the body overboard — wrapped, likely, in a shroud — after a brief service.

Obama said neither Americans nor civilians were harmed in the raid on bin Laden’s compound. Three other adult males were killed — two were bin Laden’s couriers and a third was his adult son — according to a senior administration official. One woman was killed when she was “used as a shield by a male combatant” and two others were injured, the official said. There were also children at the compound.

During the raid, which lasted less than 40 minutes, one U.S. helicopter broke down. The crew destroyed the helicopter with explosives, so as not to leave the technology behind, and U.S. forces exited on the remaining aircraft.

“All non-combatants were moved safely away from the compound before the detonation” of the helicopter, a U.S. official said.

U.S. government facilities around the world were placed on heightened alert after the raid, while the State Department issued a worldwide travel alert warning of “enhanced potential for anti-American violence given recent counter-terrorism activity in Pakistan.”

CIA director Leon E. Panetta told his agency that terror groups around the world “almost certainly will attempt to avenge” bin Laden’s death.

“We must — and will — remain vigilant and resolute,” Panetta wrote in a congratulatory memo. “But we have struck a heavy blow against the enemy. The only leader they have ever known, whose hateful vision gave rise to their atrocities, is no more. The supposedly uncatchable one has been caught and killed.”

Years in the making

The secret operation that culminated with bin Laden’s death was years in the making. For most of the past decade, bin Laden was thought to be hiding in Pakistan, but American intelligence had lost his trail until picking up fresh intelligence of his possible whereabouts last August.

After months of studying intelligence and reviewing operational plans, Obama gave the order on Friday morning for the action that ended in bin Laden’s death. The operation took place in Abbottabad, a city of about 100,000 in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, about 65 miles north of Islamabad. Named for a British military officer who founded it as a military cantonment and summer retreat, it is the headquarters of a brigade of the Pakistan army’s 2nd Division.

A Special Operations team conducted the mission based on CIA intelligence, some of which was obtained from detainees in U.S. custody, according to senior U.S. officials who detailed the operation under the condition of anonymity.

“We’ve been staring at the compound for months trying to figure out for sure whether we had enough to go with,” one official said. Operatives have “been working this target for years, years, years. They finally found the guy who led to the guy who led to the guy who led to the guy, and this is it.”

Beginning in September, the CIA began to work with Obama on a set of intelligence assessments, which led him to believe that it was possible that bin Laden might be located at the compound.

By mid-February, Obama determined that there was a sound intelligence basis for pursuing this theory and developing courses of action in case it proved correct. He held five National Security meetings in the second half of March to discuss potential action.

On Friday, shortly before flying to Alabama to visit tornado-ravaged communities, Obama gathered senior officials in the Diplomatic Room. At 8:20 a.m., he made the decision to undertake the operation.

National security adviser Thomas E. Donilon prepared the formal orders and convened senior national security officials that afternoon to plan for the operation. The United States did not share any intelligence with foreign governments, including Pakistan’s, and only a “very small number” of people within the U.S. government knew about it, one official said.

Throughout the afternoon Sunday, Obama met with senior officials in the Situation Room for briefings on the operation. At 3:50 p.m., Obama learned that bin Laden was tentatively identified, and the president remained “actively involved in all facets of the operation, ” a senior administration official said.

The courier

The operation hinged almost entirely on the hunt for a single man: a courier working out of Pakistan who had been trusted by bin Laden for years.

U.S. analysts and operatives spent years figuring out the courier’s identity, senior administration officials said, concluding that he was a former protege of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-declared mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks who is being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The courier “had our constant attention,” one official said.

Detainees “identified this man as one of the few al-Qaeda couriers trusted by bin Laden, [and] indicated he might be living with or protecting bin Laden,” the official said. But until four years ago, the United States was unable to track the courier down or uncover his real name. In 2009, U.S. officials narrowed down the region in Pakistan where the courier was working, senior administration officials said.

Then, in August, U.S. officials found the compound that turned out to be bin Laden’s hiding spot. It was described as an extraordinary place, with 12- to 18-foot security walls, multiple interior walls dividing the property and massive privacy walls blocking even a third-story balcony.

“When we saw the compound ... we were shocked by what we saw,” the official told reporters, describing it as “an extraordinarily unique compound,” built perhaps in 2005 and expressly for bin Laden. “Everything we saw ... was perfectly consistent with what our experts expected bin Laden’s hideout to look like.”

A senior official said the property, valued at $1 million, had no Internet or phone service. But photos of the property appeared to show a satellite dish at the property — a discrepancy that was not immediately explained.

Bin Laden’s capture offered a sense of closure for families of those lost in the 2001 attacks. Basmattie Bishundat, whose son, Kris Romeo Bishundat, died at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, was glued to her television in the Maryland suburb Waldorf in the early hours of Monday, wishing she could join the revelers at the White House.

“I cannot believe it, finally,” Bishundat murmured as she watched the pictures from the White House on CNN. “All kinds of emotions. Finally, a sense of closure. Finally, they’ve got the person who started all of this mess.”

With the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks approaching this year, bin Laden’s assassination could benefit Obama domestically even more than the capture of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein helped propel then-President George W. Bush to reelection in 2004.

Obama called Bush and former president Bill Clinton, as well as senior congressional leaders, before announcing bin Laden’s death to the nation.

Although Bush and former officials were quick to declare bin Laden’s killing a victory that transcended party lines, it represented the culmination of the former president’s promise, never fulfilled during his time in office, to capture the al-Qaeda leader “dead or alive.”

In a statement, Bush congratulated Obama and the military and intelligence personnel who “devoted their lives to this mission.”

“They have our everlasting gratitude,” Bush said. “This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001. The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done.”

Obama announced bin Laden’s death eight years to the day after Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq, a war spawned in large part by the Sept. 11 attacks, in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of state, said in her own statement: “Nothing can bring back bin Laden’s innocent victims, but perhaps this can help salve the wounds of their loved ones.”

Victory for U.S.

Bin Laden, the son of a billionaire Saudi Arabian contractor, was wanted by the United States not only for the Sept. 11 hijackings but also for al-Qaeda’s bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, which killed 224 civilians and wounded more than 5,000 people. The U.S. government had offered a $25 million reward for information leading to his capture or death.

He was one of a handful of Islamist radicals who in 1988 founded al-Qaeda — which means “the base” in Arabic — to coordinate the efforts of various groups fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan. After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, al-Qaeda eventually shifted its effort to target another superpower: the United States.

A senior administration official said the loss of bin Laden puts al-Qaeda “on a path of decline that will be difficult to reverse.”

“As the only al-Qaeda leader whose authority was universally respected, he also maintained his cohesion, and his likely successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is far less charismatic and not as well respected within the organization, according to comments from several captured al-Qaeda leaders,” the official said. “He probably will have difficulty maintaining the loyalty of bin Laden’s largely Gulf Arab followers.”

That bin Laden was killed — rather than captured — was a victory itself for U.S. officials, who had dreaded the prospect of a long and complicated legal battle if he was taken into U.S. custody.

With the military brig at Guantanamo Bay no longer being used to house new detainees, and with the country paralyzed by the politics of where and how to try other alleged perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks, the logistics of trying bin Laden could have turned the capture into a spectacle. Now, although he might become a martyr to his supporters, it will be as an invisible hero.

“Every day he was alive was a symbolic victory,” said Dan Byman, director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and professional staff member on the 9/11 Commission. “This is a man we have hunted with different degrees of intensity for more than 10 years. ... His successful defiance was damaging to the United States.”

Washington reacts

Obama’s announcement on Sunday seemed to electrify Washington and indeed the country. Hundreds of people streamed toward the White House with flags, some chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” In New York, many more were celebrating at Ground Zero and in Times Square.

Before Obama announced the killing, top administration officials divided up the most senior members of Congress and began making calls in the evening, according to congressional aides in both parties. Vice President Biden contacted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.); Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates called Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee; and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Senior congressional leaders issued statements commending the military for the killing.

“Today, the American people have seen justice,” House Homeland Security Chairman Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), whose Long Island district lost many in the 2001 attacks, said in a statement. “In 2001, President Bush said, ‘We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not fail.’ President Bush deserves great credit for putting action behind those words. President Obama deserves equal credit for his resolve in this long war against al-Qaeda.”

Kerry urged vigilance, saying: “A single death does not end the threat from al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups.”

“The killing of Osama bin Laden closes an important chapter in our war against extremists who kill innocent people around the world,” Kerry added. “We are a nation of peace and laws, and people everywhere should understand that our 10-year manhunt was in search of justice not revenge. Terrorists everywhere must never doubt that the United States will hunt them down no matter where they are, no matter how long it takes.”

Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) told CNN: “We’ve cut the head off of the worm, but they may grow another head.”

Minutes after the news broke on Sunday night, hundreds of people rushed to the White House to celebrate. Many were George Washington University students who were cramming for finals when someone alerted an entire dormitory building after seeing a bulletin on television.

“I feel like relief,” said freshman Molly Nostrand, 19, who was a fourth-grader in 2001. “After 10 years, it’s a sense of closure in a way.”

Those who arrived early to the impromptu street celebration sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” in roars and chanted “U.S.A.!” Many brought American flags and some put together signs.

“Ding, Dong, Bin Laden is Dead,” one read.

One group of waved a “Bush-Cheney 2000” election poster.

“I think it’s an accomplishment for the U S of A,” Richard Indoe, 73, a farmer from Ohio said, shortly after filming a few seconds of the revelry using a flip cellphone. “Too bad this didn’t happen during George W. Bush’s time.”

Staff writers Karen DeYoung, Ernesto Londoño, Glenn Kessler, Paul Kane, Felicia Sonmez and Amy Gardner contributed to this report.

Pope beatifies John Paul II before a crowd of over 1.5 million, tears and cheers erupt

By Associated Press, Sunday, May , 8:22 PM

VATICAN CITY — Some 1.5 million pilgrims flooded Rome to watch Pope John Paul II move a step closer to sainthood in one of the largest Vatican Masses in history, an outpouring of adoration for a beloved and historic figure after years marred by church scandal.

The turnout for the beatification Sunday far exceeded even the most optimistic expectation of 1 million people, the number Rome city officials predicted. For Catholics filling St. Peter’s Square and its surrounding streets, and for those watching around the world the beatification was a welcome hearkening back to the days when the pope was almost universally beloved.

“He was like a king to us, like a father,” Marynka Ulaszewska, a 28-year-old from Ciechocinek, Poland, said, weeping. “I hope these emotions will remain with us for a long time,” she said.

Pope Benedict XVI praised John Paul for turning back the seemingly “irreversible” tide of communism with faith, courage and “the strength of a titan, a strength which came to him from God.”

John Paul is universally credited with helping bring down communism in his native Poland with support for the Solidarity labor movement, accelerating the fall of the Iron Curtain.

“He rightly reclaimed for Christianity that impulse of hope which had in some sense faltered before Marxism and the ideology of progress,” Benedict said. “He restored to Christianity its true face as a religion of hope.”

John Paul’s beatification, the fastest in modern times, has however triggered a new wave of anger from sex-abuse victims because much of the criminality occurred during his 27-year watch. Critics also say John Paul’s legacy is clouded by evidence of a dwindling faith: empty churches in Europe, too few priests in North and South America, priests who violate their celibacy requirement in places like Africa and a general decline of Catholicism in former Christian strongholds.

John Paul’s defenders argue that an entire generation of new priests owe their vocations to John Paul, and that millions of lay Catholics found their faith during the World Youth Days, which were a hallmark of his papacy.

Vatican officials have insisted that the saint-making process isn’t a judgment of how John Paul administered the church but rather whether he lived a life of Christian virtue.

Benedict put John Paul on the fast-track for possible sainthood when he dispensed with the traditional five-year waiting period and allowed the beatification process to begin weeks after his April 2, 2005, death. Benedict was responding to chants of “Santo Subito!” or “Sainthood Immediately” which erupted during John Paul’s funeral.

With a sea of red and white Polish flags fluttering in the square, the beatification Sunday evoked the days after the pope’s death in 2005, when some 3 million faithful held vigil under his studio window and filed past his remains for days on end.

Pilgrims from Mexico to Mali repeated the procession after the Mass Sunday, for hours filing past the simple wooden coffin that had been raised from the grottoes underneath St. Peter’s Basilica to the church’s center aisle, where it was surrounded by four Swiss Guards standing at attention.

Beatification is the last major milestone before a candidate is declared a saint. John Paul needs another miracle attributed to his intercession before he can be canonized.

Already, Vatican officials have said reports of inexplicable cures were pouring in, suggesting it is only a matter of time before John Paul is declared a saint, or even a doctor of the church — an even greater honor.

Police placed wide swaths of Rome miles (kilometers) from the Vatican off limits to private cars to ensure security for the estimated 16 heads of state, eight prime ministers and five members of European royal houses attending.

Helicopters flew overhead, police boats patrolled the nearby Tiber River and some 5,000 uniformed troops manned police barricades to ensure priests, official delegations and those with coveted VIP passes could get to their places amid the throngs of pilgrims.

Spain’s Crown Prince Felipe and Princess Letizia, wearing a black lace mantilla, mingled with Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, Poland’s historic Solidarity leader and former President Lech Walesa and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who sidestepped a European Union travel ban to attend.

“He went all over the world,” said Bishop Jean Zerbo of Bamako, Mali, who came to Rome for the ceremony. “Today, we’re coming to him.”

Many in Rome and in capitals around the world erupted in cheers, tears and applause as Benedict pronounced John Paul “Blessed” and an enormous color photo of a young, smiling John Paul was unveiled over the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica.

“John Paul is an angel, he has such charisma,” said Esperanza Concilion, a 69-year-old hairdresser who traveled from Guadalajara, Mexico for the beatification.

Catholics jammed churches from Mexico to Australia to pray and watch broadcasts of the Rome Mass on television.

“He was a model and an inspiration who united the world with his extraordinary charisma,” said John Paul Bustillo, a 16-year-old medical student named after the pontiff who turned out Sunday along with more than 3,000 others for a six-mile (10-kilometer) race followed by a Mass near Manila Bay in the Philippines.

In Brazil, which has more Roman Catholics than any other nation, the beatification resonated among the faithful and sparked hope that it might renew faith in the church in the South American nation which is facing stiff competition for souls from evangelical Protestant movements.

“The beatification is going to renovate the faith of those who may have lost their way and left the church,” said Adimir Godoy, as he left a Sunday mass at the Santa Cecilia church in central Sao Paulo. “We were all blessed by the life of Pope John Paul and he deserves to be a saint.”

In John Paul’s native Poland, tens of thousands of people gathered in rain in a major sanctuary in Krakow and in Wadowice, where the pontiff was born in 1920 as Karol Wojtyla. Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his wife Malgorzata watched the ceremony together with Wadowice residents.

In Panama, Roman Catholic authorities laid the first stone of a chapel that will be built in honor of the late pope. The site in Albrook marks the spot where John Paul II held a mass during his 1983 visit to the Central American country.

In the United States. many churches held special masses and other programs to honor the first pope to connect widely with American Catholics, especially young believers.

At Denver’s Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, a statue of Pope John Paul II was adorned with flowers left by parishioners. Inside, tulips were placed next to a picture of the pope, who visited Denver in August 1993 to celebrate World Youth Day VIII.

“For most of my life, he was the pope,” said the Rev. Matthew Hartley told those gathered for a mass celebrating John Paul’s beatification.

Joy Armbruster said she was there when the pope visited in 1993.

“I’m of Polish descent. Because of that, I always felt a kinship to the pope,” Armbruster said, tears welling up. “Just to be in the presence of a man like that. When he walked into the room, the atmosphere changed.”

Before the service three members of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests handed out fliers asking for help in protecting children for sexual abuse. SNAP leader Jeb Barrett says his group has passed out fliers in three Denver-area parishes.

At Chicago’s Five Holy Martyrs Church, there was an outdoor celebratory Mass on Sunday afternoon with musicians in traditional Polish folk clothing. John Paul II celebrated an open-air Mass at the church on Oct. 5, 1979, during a visit to Chicago.

After the nearly three-hour Mass in Rome, Benedict prayed before John Paul’s coffin, which had a copy of the Lorsch Gospels on it, an illuminated medieval book of the Gospels that is one of the most precious in the Vatican’s collection.

The basilica was expected to stay open for as long as it takes to accommodate the throngs of faithful who paid their respects and took photos as loudspeakers piped in hymns and clips of some of John Paul’s most memorable homilies and speeches.

The sealed coffin will ultimately be moved to a side chapel inside the basilica just next to Michelangelo’s famous marble “Pieta” statue.

Police put the figure of those attending the Mass at 1.5 million; only a few hundred thousand could fit into St. Peter’s Square and the surrounding streets but others watched it on some of the 14 huge TV screens set up around town or listened to it on radios in Polish or Italian.

During the Mass, Benedict received a silver reliquary holding a vial of blood taken from John Paul during his final hospitalization. The relic, a key feature of beatification ceremonies, will be available for the faithful to venerate.

It was presented to him by Sister Tobiana, the Polish nun who tended to John Paul throughout his pontificate, and Sister Marie Simone-Pierre of France, whose inexplicable recovery from Parkinson’s disease was decreed to be the miracle necessary for John Paul to be beatified.

____

Associated Press writers Daniela Petroff in Vatican City, Juan Zamorano in Panama City, Bradley Brooks in Sao Paulo, Jim Gomez in Manila, Monika Scislowska in Krakow, P. Solomon Banda in Denver and Caryn Rousseau in Chicago contributed to this story.