Osama bin Laden may be dead, but America's entrepreneurial spirit lives on. Want a creepy relic to commemorate NOsama Day? Bid on bin Laden's (alleged) beard! Got $12,000? The domain name BinLadenConspiracy.com could be yours! Below, 6 OBL commemorative options, starting with two Mother's Day gift ideas:

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David Corn joined Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC's The Last Word to discuss former President George W. Bush's decision to decline President Obama's invitation to attend a ceremony at Ground Zero following the death of Osama bin Laden. They also discuss the political gamble Obama took in authorizing the attack and how the success of the operation might influence his popularity.

Elsewhere in Mother Jones, Dave Gilson breaks down the numbers behind the most expensive manhunt in history, Adam Weinstein reports on the reactions of bin Laden's supporters as well as active-duty soldiers, and Josh Harkinson rounds up ten ways the right is spinning bin Laden's death. Stephanie Mencimer checks in on the tea party, and Mike Mechanic pulls together a slideshow of major daily front pages.

David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief. For more of his stories, click here. He's also on Twitter and Facebook. Get David Corn's RSS feed.

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When he planned the 9/11 attacks, was Osama bin Laden's goal to drag the United States into a series of endless wars that would bankrupt us? I said earlier that I was "a little skeptical of attempts to take this argument too far" because bin Laden's statements to this effect all came well after 9/11. But Daveed Gartenstein-Ross tweets:

Re OBL not having economics in mind on 9/11, see his contemporary comments to Allouni, which I quote here: http://bit.ly/kf1vdx 

So I clicked:

Bin Laden's strategy's initial phase linked terrorist attacks directly to economic harm....In a wide-ranging interview conducted by Al Jazeera's Taysir Allouni in the month following the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden spoke at length about the extent of the economic damage the attacks had inflicted. "According to [the Americans'] own admissions," he said, "the share of the losses on the Wall Street market reached 16%. They said that this number is a record."....Factoring in building and construction losses, along with lost productivity, he concluded that the cost to the United States was "no less than $1 trillion."

But this is an entirely different thing. This is merely bin Laden bragging about the amount of damage caused by the 9/11 attacks themselves. It says nothing about whether his longer term goal was to draw the United States into ruinously expensive military adventures overseas and massive internal security overreactions at home.

Just to be clear: I agree that economic warfare was implicit in bin Laden's thinking. (Likewise, Gartenstein-Ross agrees that America's potential future insolvency is mostly the result of domestic politics, not the war against al-Qaeda.) I'd just be careful about inferring more than the evidence will bear here. The first time that bin Laden explicitly said that his strategy was to bleed the United States into bankruptcy was in 2004, after the United States had invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq. Maybe that really was his intent all along. But it seems more likely that it was something he invented after the fact to make it look as if everything was going according to plan. It may have been one thread in his thinking, but I'm not sure you can say too much more than that about it.

FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH: My take on al-Qaeda's actions and motivations comes largely from Steve Coll's Ghost Wars and Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower. And Wright does say that bin Laden "wanted to lure the United State into Afghanistan, which was already being called the graveyard of empires" (though he doesn't source this contention). But bin Laden himself seemed to have more prosaic views, namely that the United States was inherently decadent and weak and would retreat from the Middle East if faced by a sufficiently determined jihadist guerrilla movement, and his #2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, appeared to believe that striking the United States (and thus drawing the U.S. into battle) would serve primarily as a way of inspiring young jihadists to join the cause.

But I'm unquestionably no expert on this. Maybe there's more evidence than I think that bin Laden's strategy from the start was to bait the United States into spending itself into bankruptcy. I'd just like to hear a little more pre-9/11 evidence for this.

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Elsewhere in Mother Jones, David Corn analyzes the political gamble Obama took in authorizing the attack, Dave Gilson breaks down the numbers behind the most expensive manhunt in history, and Josh Harkinson rounds up ten ways the right is spinning bin Laden's death. Adam Weinstein reports on the reactions of bin Laden's supporters as well as active-duty soldiers, Stephanie Mencimer checks in on the tea party, and Mike Mechanic pulls together a slideshow of major daily front pages.

Pete Marovich/ZumaThis post first appeared on the ProPublica website.

The death of Osama bin Laden has sent news organizations scrambling for details on how it happened, where it happened, and what it all means. We've rounded up some of the best coverage, being careful to note what's been said, what's already being disputed, and what still remains to be seen.
 

How they found the most wanted man in the world:

The New York Times has a vivid account of the hunt for bin Laden in the weeks leading up to the strike, with dialogue straight from the situation room as the operation unfolded. As for the specific trail of intelligence, the Associated Press traces how detainees in both the CIA's secret network of prisons and in Guantanamo provided clues about the trusted courier who ultimately led the United States to bin Laden's hideaway. The AP cites former officials asserting that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, was not being waterboarded while discussing the courier, though that still leaves unanswered what interrogation methods were used on the other, tip-giving detainees—many of whom haven't been identified.

But here's the interrogation file of one detainee who may have proved useful: The file of Abu al-Libi contained an early clue as to the whereabouts of a bin Laden courier in Abbottabad.
 

What we actually know about the operation and what's still fuzzy:

Most accounts of the bin Laden operation at this point cite background briefings from the White House. Those transcripts are interesting for both the details they provide and the details that officials skirt around. Here's yesterday's and today's.

Many of the blow-by-blows of the bin Laden operation are still fairly sketchy, and Obama administration officials already appear to be backing away from a few of the earlier descriptions of the circumstances surrounding bin Laden's death. For instance, early claims that bin Laden was armed at the time of his death and had used his wife as a human shield have since been contradicted by officials, Politico reported.

Given this, Slate's Jack Shafer has a must-read, pointing out several instances of vague sourcing and inconsistencies in some of the coverage of the bin Laden story.

Of course, some have taken that skepticism a step further and veered into conspiracy theories, seizing on the sea burial and the timing of the President's announcement as suspicious. (Slate has more on why the sea burial is unusual.) The administration has said it's considering releasing the photo of bin Laden's body or videos of the raid and the burial to put these suspicions to rest.

The Joint Special Operations Command, whose elite team of Navy Seals executed the operation, costs the country more than $1 billion annually, according to National Journal. Despite some of its personnel having been involved in abuse of prisoners and rendition, JSOC has operated without much scrutiny since 9/11—read the piece for more helpful context.

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