Shadowman

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Like a snake in camouflage I am completely hidden in the dark. I strike directly at the heart. Beware if me. You cannot always walk in the light.

Don was reading the Seattle Standard as he finished his breakfast and waited for his carpool to arrive. Normally he read the Daily Break but this morning his eyes had caught a headline that lead his purusal to the Obituaries.

"Osama bin Laden, who was killed in Pakistan on Monday, 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.

With the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, bin Laden was elevated to the realm of evil in the American imagination once reserved for dictators like Hitler and Stalin. He was a new national enemy, his face on wanted posters. He gloated on videotapes, taunting the United States and Western civilization."
"He had become a hero in much of the Islamic world, as much a myth as a man — what a longtime C.I.A. officer called “the North Star” of global terrorism. He had united disparate militant groups, from Egypt to the Philippines, under the banner of Al Qaeda and his ideal of a borderless brotherhood of radical Islam.

Terrorism before Bin Laden was often state-sponsored, but he was a terrorist who had sponsored a state. From 1996 to 2001 he bought the protection of the Taliban, then the rulers of Afghanistan, and used the time and freedom to make Al Qaeda — which means “the base” in Arabic — into a multinational enterprise for the export of terrorism.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the names Al Qaeda and Bin Laden spread to every corner of the globe. Groups calling themselves Al Qaeda, or acting in the name of its cause, attacked American troops in Iraq, bombed tourist spots in Bali and blew up passenger trains in Spain. "
Condolances can be sent to his widows or contributions made to Al Quaeda can keep his dream alive.
How strange, Don thought that an obituary would contain a news article and stranger still that it would be in his newspaper. He wondered who had subnitted it. There was no funeral service listed. This comment though put a chill in his spine. "You can be a shadowman. Help us keep his dream alive."

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