Nine and a half years later ....

From MSNBC:

WASHINGTON — Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is dead and the U.S. has his body, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

U.S. President Barack Obama was to make the announcement shortly that after searching in vain for bin Laden since he disappeared in Afghanistan in late 2001, the Saudi-born extremist is dead, the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Details of the death were sparse. A senior U.S. counterterrorism official, who spoke with the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said bin Laden was killed in a ground operation in Pakistan, not by a Predator drone. The official said it happened last week.

CNN and Reuters reported that the al-Qaida leader was killed in a mansion outside Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

It is a major accomplishment for Obama and his national security team, having fulfilled the goal once voiced by Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, to bring to justice the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

 Was it worth it? After 114 months and change, hundreds of billions of dollars spent and so many civilian and soldiers' lives lost? I want to say "yes", but ... if the SEALs had gotten him on September 12, 2001, I would still wonder if justice had been satisfied. Sometimes it just seems out of our feeble grasp.

Update: May 2, 2011
My friend Suburbanbanshee from Aliens in This World apparently attributes ObL's demise to the recently-beatified JP2:

Is There Anything Blessed JPII Can’t Do? :)

Frees his country, starts the breakup of the Soviet Union, gets beatified on the same day Communists used to make merry (and which belonged to Mama Mary before they tried to steal it), and spends his heaven getting a prince to quit shacking up and a bad Saudi to meet his maker.
Either that, or somebody Polish-American was feeling particularly festive today.

 Here's a video popout from MSNBC on the SEAL/CIA gun battle that took ObL out. His compound was in Abbotabad ... and as soon as I heard that, I heard in my mind Lou Costello yelling, "Hey, Abbotabad!" [I corrected the earlier misreport that he'd been killed by a USAF drone.]

Later:

Photo essay from TIME.com showing the celebration and reflection near Ground Zero. Alas, as Subvet (below) predicted, Our Glorious Leader is already picking up some political brownie points, though his only real contribution to the matter is keeping our troops over there.

BTW, despite my conflicted feelings, I'd like to express my gratitude to the SEALs and CIA counter-terrorist forces who participated in the op: OOH-RAH!

Later than that:

Okay, so the US doesn't have his body; it's been buried at sea. Apparently the Saudis refused it, and US officials were concerned about a landside gravesite becoming the focus of a martyr cult.

Even later:

 How many people made this mistake?