Allah is my co-pilot

Did anybody else notice the supreme irony in the final and clinching proof of Usama bin Ladin's involvement in the attacks of September 11th?
Think about this. Here we have a man who, to a large portion of the world's population, is nothing short of Satan's spokesperson on Earth. What proof did we expect to find? The dead body of some Ahmed or Abdul, with Bin Ladin's fingerprints all over him, executed for trying to chicken out? Or maybe an intercepted, static-filled instruction to the hijackers to "kill them all"? Perhaps some ally, devastated by the senseless slaughter of the innocent, decided to rat on him? The answer is none of the above.

In fact, US Intelligence officials had bugged Bin Ladin's stepmother's phone, and picked up a call he made to her. He told her that something big was about to happen and that she probably wouldn't see him for a long time. Imagine the man who knows perfectly well that he has just decided to commit one of the most blatant acts of cruelty and terrorism, worrying about his stepmom.
It is not my intention here to write an apology for Bin Ladin. The sheer insanity and obsessedness of his actions do nothing to warrant any excuse. But I do see some human ambiguity peeping around the corner, some hopeful sign that even at times of utmost absurdity, even the very source of this outrageousness does stuff we all would do. Bin Ladin is an amazingly cruel man, but he is still a man. The conclusion from this is that no matter how much beyond reason our existence and the events around us seem to be, we can never throw our hands in the air and shout, 'I give up, there's no point to this. There's no way to understand this.' Bin Ladin's phone call showed that, however unreal all of this seems, it is real. Understanding that, I think, is the only way the planet can heal from what happened.