Al-Qaeda leader Bin Laden 'dead'. Again.

[Magda Hassan]

If it is any help http://www.bbc.co.uk/urdu/pakistan/2012/...t_ar.shtml I don't know Urdu...

[Peter Lemkin]

If it is any help http://www.bbc.co.uk/urdu/pakistan/2012/...t_ar.shtml I don't know Urdu...

I'm sure there will be a good translation on the internet by later today...if not there already....I can wait. :what: [My Urdu is very rusty~]

[Carsten Wiethoff]

According to the German "Der Spiegel", Osama Bin Ladens three widows, his children and a grandchild, who were found left behind in Abbotabad after the shooting of Osama Bin Laden will be free tonight at midnight and then be deported to Saudi Arabia. They had been convicted to 45 days in prison for illegal stay in Pakistan.

The youngest, Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, is of Yemeni nationality and is expected to return there.

Theoretically they will be free to speak to whoever they want after their release.

[Carsten Wiethoff]

From http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/bin-lad...6333870169

And with breathtaking gall, she said, "I would love to meet the royal family."
Besotted Amal Abdulfattah al Sadah, 29 - who wed bin Laden when she was 17 because she wanted a "holy warrior" husband - supported his war on the West and went on the run with him after 9/11.
She was wounded in the leg trying to shield him when US commandos shot him dead in Pakistan, aged 54, last year.
She was even tipped to take over as boss of al-Qaeda.
But as Ms Sadah and bin Laden's two other wives were due to be kicked out of Pakistan, it was thought she may try to claim asylum, whining that she faces death or persecution if she is made to return to her native Yemen.

She denies being an extremist, claiming she longs to live with her family in the country her husband despised.
Her brother Zakaria al Sadah told The Sun, "We would definitely like to live in the UK - we have nothing against the UK or its people. Amal would migrate there if given a chance."
"She loves humanity and likes to live in a liberal environment," he added.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Carsten - thanks for posting.

Just to contextualise, the two sources, Murdoch's right-wing gutter tabloid, The Sun, and the broadsheet organ of the British Conservative party, the Daily Telegraph, are currently furiously ranting about the failure to extradite Muslim cleric Qatada to Jordan.

The claim that these Bin Laden relatives want to live in the UK is perfect for their agenda of asserting that Britain can't deport terrorists and can't even prevent terrorists from immigrating to the UK.

The quotes from the Bin Laden family may be genuine. However, I'd like to see a source other than right wing hacks before viewing this story as anything other than propaganda feeding a particular agenda.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Ooh lookee!

The Bogeyman lives beyond the grave.

"A Washington-based source" is anonymously briefing hacks that "documents found in the house where Osama bin Laden was killed a year ago show a close working relationship between top al-Qaida leaders and Mullah Omar, the overall commander of the Taliban".

And those hacks are spreading the propaganda nonsense.

Noone with a part-functioning brain and a memory of the exact same psyop being pulled again and again (remember the Saddam WMD documents in rubble fake?) will believe a word of this.

Sadly, though, it will serve its purpose and the agenda of the global Volkland Security Complex.

Bin Laden files show al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in close contact

Blow to Afghan peace hopes as documents reveal Bin Laden, Zawahiri and Omar discussed joint operations against Nato
Jason Burke

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 29 April 2012 18.24 BST


Documents found in the house where Osama bin Laden was killed a year ago show a close working relationship between top al-Qaida leaders and Mullah Omar, the overall commander of the Taliban, including frequent discussions of joint operations against Nato forces in Afghanistan, the Afghan government and targets in Pakistan.

The communications show a three-way conversation between Bin Laden, his then deputy Ayman Zawahiri and Omar, who is believed to have been in Pakistan since fleeing Afghanistan after the collapse of his regime in 2001.

They indicate a "very considerable degree of ideological convergence", a Washington-based source familiar with the documents told the Guardian.

The news will undermine hopes of a negotiated peace in Afghanistan, where the key debate among analysts and policymakers is whether the Taliban seen by many as following an Afghan nationalist agenda might once again offer a safe haven to al-Qaida or like-minded militants, or whether they can be persuaded to renounce terrorism.

One possibility, experts say, is that although Omar built a strong relationship with Bin Laden and Zawahiri, other senior Taliban commanders see close alliance or co-operation with al-Qaida as deeply problematic.

Western intelligence officials estimate that there are less than 100 al-Qaida-linked fighters in Afghanistan, and last year the United Nations split its sanctions list to separate the Taliban and al-Qaida.

Both David Cameron and US secretary of state Hillary Clinton have said that some kind of political settlement involving the Taliban is key to the stability of Afghanistan once most western troops have withdrawn by 2014.

Some communications in the documents date back several years but others are said to be from only weeks before the raid on 2 May last year in which Bin Laden died.

"Questions and issues come up. They don't see eye to eye on everything but it's clear they understand they have an interest in co-operating [on attacks against Nato, Afghan government and Pakistani targets]," the source said. "Of those engaged in the conversation, two [Zawahiri and Omar] are still alive today and there is no reason to believe that either has substantially changed his views in the last year."

Zawahiri became leader of al-Qaida following Bin Laden's death.

The range of the al-Qaida senior leadership's interlocutors revealed by the documents has also surprised investigators, the source said.

Bin Laden appears to have been in direct or indirect communication with Nigerian-based militant group Boko Haram as well as many other militant outfits. As with the Taliban, the question of whether Boko Haram, which has been responsible for a series of suicide attacks and bombings in the last year, is in touch with al-Qaida or one of its affiliates has been hotly debated by analysts.

But documents in the cache show that leaders of the Nigerian group had been in contact with top levels of al-Qaida in the past 18 months confirming claims made to the Guardian in January by a senior Boko Haram figure.

Other papers in the haul are now likely to be declassified. They include memos apparently dictated by Bin Laden urging followers to avoid indiscriminate attacks which kill Muslims and pondering a rebranding of al-Qaida under a new name.

The documents include memos stating broad strategic aims but little "hands-on" planning, according to sources.

Despite the correspondence with Omar and other groups, Bin Laden still appears to have been largely out of touch with the day to day working of his organisation. His communications were written on a computer in the compound in Abbottabad where he lived, loaded on to memory sticks and then sent from distant internet cafes by a courier. It was this courier who eventually led the CIA to the al-Qaida chief.

A reliable account of Bin Laden's life on the run can now be established, pieced together from the testimony, viewed by the Guardian, of one of Bin Laden's wives, the recollections of the ISI officers who interviewed her compiled by retired Pakistani army brigadier Shaukat Qadir, statements of militants detained by the US published by WikiLeaks and interviews with former US officials.

Following the collapse of the Taliban regime in November 2001, Bin Laden's wives and children fled Afghanistan , travelling first to Karachi, the vast Pakistani port city, where they spent several months. Bin Laden himself headed north into the remote Afghan province of Kunar after the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001. According to ISI officials quoted by Qadir, a senior militant detained by the ISI in 2006 told interrogators that Bin Laden had met Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan insurgent leader, in Kunar at this time. ISI officials also maintain that Khaled Sheikh Mohamed told them that the al-Qaida chief was there.

Former American officials this weekend told the Guardian that there was considerable intelligence indicating that Bin Laden was in eastern Afghanistan and making occasional journeys across the border into Pakistan at this time.

By the summer of 2004, Bin Laden appears to have moved into Pakistan permanently. According to the testimony of his youngest, Yemeni-born wife, she and her two children were reunited with her husband in a house in a remote district of the rugged Swat valley, in northwest Pakistan, in March 2004, before moving to another safe house in a small town called Haripur, 20 miles from Abbottabad, that autumn. In early summer 2005 the family then moved into the newly constructed compound where they would spend the next six years. They were joined there by Bin Laden's second wife and her three children.

According to ISI officers interviewed by Qadir, the location had been scouted a year previously by senior militant Abu Farraj al-Libbi who then travelled to Swat to get Bin Laden's approval for the move. The al-Qaida chief insisted that the land for the house be bought, not rented, and sketched out a design for the construction currently in the possession of the ISI.

The al-Qaida leader himself evaded detection while on the move by pretending to be an ailing Pashtun former militant, still on Pakistan's wanted list, who hoped to return home to die, Qadir has written.

Western security officials believe Bin Laden's oldest wife joined him in Abbottabad after being released in deal between Iranian authorities and a Pakistani militant group holding an Iranian diplomat.

By November 2010, the crucial courier had been identified and located. He then led the hunters to the Abbottabad house.

[Peter Lemkin]

Finding Bin Laden: The Truth Behind the Official Story
Thursday, 03 May 2012 09:07
By Gareth Porter, Truthout | Report

Posters of 22 fugitives, including Osama bin Laden, line a wall at the FBI headquarters in Washington, October 10, 2001. (Photo: Stephen Crowley / The New York Times)
A few days after US Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a "senior intelligence official" briefing reporters on the materials seized from bin Laden's compound said the materials revealed that bin Laden had, "continued to direct even tactical details of the group's management." Bin Laden was, "not just a strategic thinker for the group," said the official. "He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions." The official called the bin Laden compound, "an active command and control center."

The senior intelligence official triumphantly called the discovery of bin Laden's hideout, "the greatest intelligence success perhaps of a generation," and administration officials could not resist leaking to reporters that a key element in that success was that the CIA interrogators had gotten the name of bin Laden's trusted courier from al-Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo. CIA Director Leon Panetta was quite willing to leave the implication that some of the information had been obtained from detainees by "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Such was the official line at the time. But none of it was true. It is now clear that CIA officials were blatantly misrepresenting both bin Laden's role in al-Qaeda when he was killed and how the agency came to focus on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

In fact, during his six years in Abbottabad, bin Laden was not the functioning head of al-Qaeda at all, but an isolated figurehead who had become irrelevant to the actual operations of the organization. The real story, told here for the first time, is that bin Laden was in the compound in Abbottabad because he had been forced into exile by the al-Qaeda leadership.

The CIA's claim that it found bin Laden on its own is equally false. In fact, the intensive focus on the compound in Abbottabad was the result of crucial intelligence provided by the Pakistani intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Truthout has been able to reconstruct the real story of bin Laden's exile in Abbottabad, as well as how the CIA found him, thanks in large part to information gathered last year from Pakistani tribal and ISI sources by retired Pakistani Brig. Gen. Shaukat Qadir. But that information was confirmed, in essence, in remarks after the bin Laden raid by the same senior intelligence official cited above - remarks that have been ignored until now.

What the Bin Laden Documents Reveal

The initial claims about what the documents from the Abbottabad compound showed about bin Laden's role in al-Qaeda were not based on any substantive evidence because the documents had not even been read, much less analyzed by the CIA. That process would take six weeks of intensive work by the analysts, cyber-experts and translators, as the Associated Press reported June 8, 2011. But with roughly 95 percent of the work done, the picture that emerged from the documents was starkly different from what the press had been told when the country was riveted to the story.

Osama bin Laden had indeed come up with plenty of ideas about attacking US and Western targets, but officials now acknowledged to Associated Press that there was, "no evidence in the files that any of the ideas bin Laden proposed led to a specific action that was later carried out."

A month after the analysis of the bin Laden documents was completed, one official told CNN that they showed bin Laden writing about attacks on aircraft carrying Obama and Petraeus in Afghanistan. Another official familiar with the documents told the network, however, that they reflected bin Laden, "in his brainstorming mode." One official described a document in which bin Laden expressed interest in having a team plan attacks on the United States on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. But, an official commenting on the entire collection of bin Laden documents told CNN, "[T]hese were ideas, not fully or even partially planned plots."

Eight months later, in March 2012, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, whose writing invariably reflects what top national security officials want to see in the news media, was given a "small sample" of the documents by a "senior administration official." The two documents he chose to highlight - bin Laden's musings on shooting down aircraft with Obama or Petraeus on board and attacks on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 - had already been reported by CNN in July 2011. Acknowledging that al-Qaeda did not even have the military technology to shoot down a US plane, Ignatius observed that bin Laden, "still dreamed of pulling off another spectacular terror attack against the United States."

So, several months after the Abbottabad documents had been thoroughly analyzed and the results digested by senior administration officials, the administration was unable to cite a single piece of evidence that bin Laden had given orders for - or was even involved in discussing - a real, concrete plan for an al-Qaeda action, much less one that had actually been carried out. Far from depicting bin Laden as the day-to-day decisionmaker or even "master strategist" of al-Qaeda, the documents showed a man dreaming of glorious exploits that were unconnected with reality.

"Nobody Listened to His Rantings Anymore"

The reality reflected in the documents from the Abbottabad compound is that bin Laden had been exiled by the leadership of al-Qaeda because he had come to be seen as a loose cannon who was a danger to the organization. The train of events that led to bin Laden's holing up in the compound in Abbottabad began in August 2003, in a small village in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, near the fabled caves of Tora Bora where he led a battle against US Special Forces in December 2001. It was there that the leadership of al-Qaeda conducted a series of extraordinary meetings on its most pressing problem: how to ease bin Laden out of his leadership role in the organization.

Those deliberations can now be revealed because Qadir, the retired 30-year veteran of the Pakistani Army, had served for years in South Waziristan alongside Mehsud tribesmen, with whom he had stayed in contact over the years. After the bin Laden raid, Qadir went back to his former comrades, and they introduced him to three of their relatives who had been couriers for Mehsud tribal militant leader Baitullah Mehsud in his contacts with al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, during the 2003 meetings.

Mehsud would become the head of the al-Qaeda affiliate organization Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in 2007. But in 2009, Mehsud was killed in a drone strike and the organization was splintering over various issues. All three former couriers broke their ties with Hakimullah Mehsud, Baitullah Mehsud's successor as head of TTP. The political split in the Mehsud tribal community, followed by the killing of bin Laden, released the former couriers from their oaths of secrecy. In early August 2011, Qadir was able to meet separately with each of the three former Mehsud couriers in three different villages in South Waziristan, on the understanding that their names would not be revealed.

After bin Laden moved from the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan to South Waziristan in northwest Pakistan, his health continued to decline, according to the three former Mehsud couriers. Just what ailments were causing the deterioration was not clear, but he was no longer able to walk, and had to be moved by horseback from one house in South Waziristan to another for security reasons.

But an even greater concern of the al-Qaeda shura (or council), according to the former couriers, was what appeared to bin Laden's colleagues to be his obsession with the idea that al-Qaeda should attack and capture Pakistan's nuclear reactor at Kahuta. Zawahiri, the second-ranking al-Qaeda leader, who had the task of meeting personally with bin Laden, along with the rest of the shura tried to tell bin Laden that Kahuta was impenetrable. They pointed to the presence of a regular infantry battalion, air defense, guard dogs, mines and a laser security system guarding the facility. And anyway, as they pointed out to bin Laden, there were no nuclear weapons stored there.

But none of that seemed to matter to bin Laden, who seemed delusional on the issue. "Nobody listened to his rantings anymore," said one of the couriers in a conversation with Qadir. "He had become a physical liability and was going mad," another told Qadir a couple of days earlier. "He had become an object of ridicule," said the second courier, recalling that some of the militants in South Waziristan had become aware of his harangues on the subject and were starting to make jokes at bin Laden's expense. "You can't have a leader whose people ridicule him," he said.

Zawahiri had been running the day-to-day affairs of al-Qaeda, but bin Laden was still insisting on participating in major decisions. That situation led Zawahiri to propose during a series of meetings in August 2003 that bin Laden be forced to retire from active involvement in the organization's decisions. The other members of the shura supported him, according to all three former Mehsud tribal couriers.

The only question was how to get bin Laden to agree. The shura believed bin Laden would only listen to one man: Abu Ayoub Al Iraqi, who had accompanied bin Laden to Peshawar in the early 1980s and had been a mentor to bin Laden when he founded al-Qaeda, then faded into the background. The problem was, according to the ex-couriers, that only bin Laden knew how to contact him. So, the shura decided to present a plan to bin Laden for the capture of the Kahuta nuclear base on condition that it would be subject to the approval of Iraqi.

Bin Laden agreed with the proposal and a courier was dispatched to Iraqi. But unknown to bin Laden, the courier also carried a letter from Zawahiri detailing bin Laden's condition and requesting Iraqi's help in convincing him to retire voluntarily for his own safety. The courier returned from visiting Iraqi in September 2003 with cosmetic modifications of the plan, and with the advice that the shura had requested: bin Laden should be housed in a secure location from which he could issue orders, but Zawahiri should continue to act on bin Laden's behalf in the day-to-day affairs of the organization.

The plan was to let bin Laden believe that he would still be the leader of al-Qaeda from his new safe haven. In reality, the al-Qaeda leaders were sending him into an urban exile to get him off their backs.

The shura considered various options for permanent housing for bin Laden before deciding that he should live a secluded family life in a city that would not be too far from Pakistan's tribal areas, according to the Mehsud tribal sources. The third-ranking member of the hierarchy, Mustafa al-Uzayti, a Libyan better known by his alias Abu Faraj al Libi, was tasked with finding the best location for bin Laden and his family to reside, according to Qadir's Mehsud tribal sources.

Al Libi's first choice was Mardan, about 30 miles from Peshawar, but bin Laden's courier, who used the alias Sheikh Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, suggested that it was too dangerous because some pro-al-Qaeda individuals were constantly under surveillance by Pakistani and US intelligence agencies. He suggested Abbottabad instead.

After bin Laden approved the construction of a house within a larger compound in Abbottabad, it was Kuwaiti who purchased the land and oversaw the construction. Investigators from Pakistan's ISI later learned that Kuwaiti and his younger brother moved in with their own wives, along with bin Laden and his large family of two wives, six children and four grandchildren in May or June 2005.

How Did the CIA Find Bin Laden?

Immediately after the Special Operations forces raids that killed bin Laden, a senior administration official who had an obvious interest in peddling a particular narrative about CIA interrogation techniques told reporters that the CIA interrogation of al-Qaeda detainees held at Guantanamo had been a critical factor in finally tracking down bin Laden. According to one version, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, also known as "KSM," the mastermind of the 9/11 attack, had identified bin Laden's trusted courier in 2007; in another version, unidentified detainees had given interrogators the courier's real name.

The story of bin Laden's courier was an open invitation for past and present CIA officials who had gone along with the use of torture in interrogating suspects to justify their position. CIA Director Panetta channeled their viewpoint in an interview with NBC, suggesting that, for some of the information that led the agency to bin Laden, interrogators, "used their enhanced interrogation techniques against some of the detainees." He added, "Whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always going to be an open question." Reuters reported that the story of how the administration learned about the identity of bin Laden's courier was, "certain to reopen the debate over practices that many have equated with torture."

That entire story was more disinformation. In fact, none of the detainees had divulged the actual identity of bin Laden's courier - or even the courier's alias within the organization, Sheik Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Had any of them provided the actual name of the courier, it would not have taken another four years to discover where that courier - and bin Laden - were living. Reuters, which originally reported that KSM had given up the name of the courier, later corrected the story, explaining in a note appended to it that KSM had divulged only the, "existence of courier rather than the name of the courier." None of the other outlets that had published the disinformation published a similar correction.

Another story, leaked by the CIA to Associated Press, claimed the discovery of the Abbottabad compound as the result of an electronic intercept. In August 2010, according to the story, a voice was heard in a phone conversation with someone whose cell phone US intelligence was monitoring, and from the substance of the conversation, intelligence analysts concluded that it was Kuwaiti. That in turn led CIA operatives to the Abbottabad compound, according to the story.

But is doubtful that Kuwaiti used his mobile phone to communicate with anyone who was already under surveillance in 2010. By 2008, al-Qaeda in Iraq had been largely destroyed, in large part by the US Special Forces' ability to monitor the Iraqi militants' use of mobile phones, and both the al-Qaeda shura and bin Laden himself were even more acutely aware of the danger of any electronic communications that could expose Kuwaiti. Documents retrieved from bin Laden's Abbottabad home reminded al-Qaeda officials that all internal communications were to be by letter only and not by phone or the Internet. Three ISI investigators told Qadir in three separate meetings the same thing about al-Qaeda's caution with respect to the use of cell phones for internal communications.

Furthermore, it was another six months before the CIA initiated an effort to penetrate the Abbottabad compound with a human source. It was only in February 2011 that the CIA enlisted a Pakistani doctor named Shakeel Afridi to try to gain access to the house on the pretense of a fake campaign for testing people's blood for hepatitis, according to Afridi's testimony to ISI investigators. That gap in the timeline is only one of several pieces of evidence indicating that the CIA had not, in fact, tracked someone they believed to be bin Laden's courier to the compound in Abbottabad in July or August 2010. The story of the intercepted phone call appears to be at least another misleading report on the path to Abbottabad.

The ISI Reveals a Secret

For nearly a year, Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, remained silent about how bin Laden had been found. Meanwhile, former CIA director Panetta suggested that the ISI had long known about bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad, two unnamed ISI officials asserted to The Washington Post in an April 27 article that ISI provided the CIA with the cell phone number that belonged to Kuwaiti in November 2010 and told them it was last detected in Abbottabad. But the ISI officials said that their agency did not know at the time that the number was Kuwaiti's.

A US official denied to the Post that the United States had learned about the number from the ISI. But in the initial briefing of reporters after the bin Laden raid on May 2, 2011, a "senior intelligence official" had actually confirmed, in guarded terms, that Pakistan had provided crucial information that intensified the CIA's focus on the Abbottabad compound. "The Pakistanis did not know of our interest in the compound," said the official, "but they did provide us information that helped us develop a clearer focus on this compound over time.... [T]hey provided us information attached to [the compound] to help us complete the robust intelligence case that ... eventually carried the day."

It is now clear that this acknowledgment, which was ignored in media coverage of the briefing, was a reference to ISI's providing the CIA with both the cell phone number of Arshad Khan and the fact that it belonged to the owner of the compound in Abbottabad. The unnamed official was confirming indirectly that until ISI had given it that information, the CIA had not focused on the Abbottabad compound as the likely location of bin Laden's courier, or, therefore, of bin Laden himself.

But there was more to the ISI information. Qadir was able to obtain a detailed account from ISI officers involved in the bin Laden investigation showing that ISI also told the CIA that it suspected that Khan might be linked to terrorism.

Qadir is a retired infantry officer who never worked in intelligence, but one of the officers involved in the ISI investigation of the background to the bin Laden killing had been under his command in Kurram Agency many years earlier. That connection enabled him to get access to several other ISI officers who were working on the investigation or were familiar with it. In conversations with Qadir in an ISI safe house in mid-December and over lunch at the Islamabad Club the same month, his initial ISI source told him how the ISI detachment in Abbottabad had launched an investigation of Khan in 2008.

According to Qadir's initial ISI source, Khan had let it be known locally that he had made some money from business ventures in Dubai, and that his current occupation was dealing in foreign currency exchange and real estate in Peshawar. "It was merely routine," the ISI officer emphasized. "We had no suspicions at the time."

That story put out by Kuwaiti and Khan, which was evidently an effort to explain his regular monthly visits to Peshawar, eventually reached the ISI detachment in Abbottabad. The result was a routine request to the detachment in Peshawar to make an inquiry to confirm the information. After months of methodical checking in Peshawar, the ISI unit there reported that none of the half-dozen Arshad Khans who were money changers was a resident of Abbottabad. The inconsistency was conveyed to ISI headquarters in early 2010, with a request for an expanded search in other towns, according to the ISI sources. A request was then sent to all major cities in Pakistan, just in case somebody had gotten the location of the business wrong.

After more months of routine checking, all ISI stations across the country had reported finding no trace of a Pashtun money changer named Arshad residing in Abbottabad. Furthermore, the Peshawar detachment had learned that Khan had been purchasing prescription drugs during his monthly visits to Peshawar, as Qadir learned from two separate ISI officials involved in the post-bin-Laden-raid investigation. The suspicions of ISI officials were now piqued.

It was in July 2010, after the routine investigation indicated that Khan was not telling the truth about his trips to Peshawar, that the ISI official in charge of the investigation decided that the matter was suspicious enough to bring it to the attention of the Counter Terrorism Wing (CTW) of ISI, according to Qadir's ISI sources. Those sources told Qadir they believed CTW asked the CIA for satellite surveillance of Khan's residence in Abbottabad. "I thought it was worth getting satellite coverage and forwarded the request to HQ, after consulting with my officers," the official who made the decision told Qadir. "It could have turned out to be nothing important, but if there was an important person hiding there, I would look like an incompetent fool."

The CTW had worked closely with the CIA on capturing al-Qaeda leaders and operatives over the years, and that cooperation remained intact in mid-2010, even as tensions between the two intelligence agencies were rising over the rapid increase in the number of spies the CIA had infiltrated into Pakistan that year, partly to keep tabs on ISI's relations with the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network. So, it would not have been unusual for the CTW to bring the results of the investigation of Khan to the attention of the CIA.

Five different junior and mid-level ISI officers - three in the field and two in ISI headquarters in Rawalpindi - told Qadir in separate meetings in August and September 2011 that they understood CTW had decided to forward a request to the CIA for surveillance of the Abbottabad compound.

More senior officers at headquarters claimed to Qadir, however, that they didn't know about such a request, and at an even more senior level, they denied that such a request had even been made. The pattern of responses by ISI officials is consistent with a political decision by the military leadership to avoid even the slightest cooperation with the United States linked to the killing of bin Laden, according to Qadir. Given popular Pakistani anger about the unilateral US raid that killed bin Laden, even admitting that it had played a role in triggering the surveillance of the house in Abbottabad would have played into the hands of Pakistani groups who wanted to discredit the Army as stooges of the United States. "The mood in Pakistan was ugly," Qadir explained, "and the GHQ [Army headquarters] and ISI were in the eye of the storm. They felt they had no choice but to be accused of either complicity with the CIA in the raid or incompetence, and they chose incompetence."

But since Pakistan openly broke with Washington over the US military attack on two Pakistani border posts last November, the Pakistani military has more self-confidence. Under its new chief, Lt. Gen. Zaheer ul-Islam, the ISI has become more "proactive" in responding to negative press coverage, according to the officials who spoke with the Post. The ISI revelation to the Washington Post that ISI had turned over Khan's cell phone number to the CIA in November confirms the essence of the story Qadir obtained from his sources.

The information obtained from ISI about the Abbottabad compound explains the otherwise mysterious remark by President Barack Obama on the night of the raid. "It is important here to note," Obama said, "that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound he was hiding in."

Obama's insertion of that acknowledgement of the assistance of Pakistani intelligence into his triumphant announcement of the bin Laden killing further confirms the evidence that Pakistani help in focusing on the Abbottabad compound was crucial, but senior CIA officials, assuming the news media would never catch on, had nevertheless done what officials always do if they don't believe they will be held accountable: they put out false information that made them look good. The lies surrounding the bin Laden killing are one more example of this primary leitmotif of the US national security state in the era of unaccountable permanent war.

[Peter Lemkin]

The My Lai Massacre of between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians (who's counting?) occurred on March 16, 1968, courtesy of "Charlie" Company. Most of the victims were women, children, infants, and elderly people. Some of the bodies were later found to be mutilated.[SUP][2][/SUP] While 26 US soldiers were initially charged with criminal offenses for their actions at Mỹ Lai, only Second Lieutenant William Calley, a platoon leader in Charlie Company, was convicted. Found guilty of killing 22 villagers, he was originally given a life sentence, but only served three and a half years under house arrest.

Meanwhile, back at Camp Justice....
Regarding the 9-11 Five, "Their lawyers are thousands of miles away and require special flights just to get to Guantanamo. Even when there, the lawyers are unable to talk with their clients about anything the American military decides is classified. This includes all issues having to do with the prisoners' treatment. Thus, defense lawyers can't talk in court about the specifics of their clients' complaints."
Douglas Valentine

[Magda Hassan]

Terminal X, a group of Pakistani hackers, some times have some very interesting and very good information and other times not quite at all. I'm not in a position to judge the following but just post it for the record. In any case, the same needs to be said for the US State Department and Pentagon. Caveat lector.

Exclusive: More disclosures of the Abbottabad fiasco from Pakistani security officials

THURSDAY, MAY 24, 2012 ANONYMOUS

TX Desk


Terminal X Director and Chief Intelligence Analyst Zaki Khalid has received further input from Pakistani intelligence officials about the actual events that took place during the ominous Abbottabad raid last year. Following is the commentary by the scribe himself and his communication with two ISI officials in continuation of a previous interview which was posted earlier. We make it clear that the views expressed by the officials may not necessarily reflect those of Pakistan's intelligence directorate.

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A security official from Pakistan's premier intelligence directorate has said that during the fiasco that took place on May 2 2011, one of the Sikorsky stealth choppers that had the actual SEAL "Kill Team" on-board was not even allowed to land. On the contrary, it was subjected to a take-out fire from the Pakistani side. The Sikorsky chopper tried its best to pick up altitude before crashing in a bid to escape the area but during the process, more than a dozen SEALs jumped off from the height and fell on the ground. The chopper was detonated by the Navy SEALs themselves and in this process, all the SEAL team members were burnt alive and eventually dead. Their roasted corpses were mutilated and spread out around the alleged compound of Osama bin Laden. After that detonation, the area transformed into an 'Ultra Red Zone'.

A US Army Chinook came to quickly pick up the dead officers. By this time, I have been told, Pakistan's Army Chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani was fully informed of the situation at hand. This scribe has further been told that near the alleged compound is 'a very sensitive asset' of the Pakistan military whose identity was kept classified. Fearing danger to the said asset, General Kayani immediately issued orders for 2 F-16s of the Pakistan Air Force to rush towards the nearby asset and hover over it.


As soon as the first stealth chopper crashed, the other rushed back immediately. The security official notes that there was a Pakistani Police mobile unit nearby that managed to fire some shots at the Chinook which managed to escape. The Infantry's Quick Response Force based inside the Pakistan Military Academy Kakul was still far away.


The official noted that American military officials claimed Operation 'Neptune Spear'continued for 20 minutes after the first chopper's crash. The official asked me, in a curious manner, "Does this mean the ghosts of the dead SEALs carried out the operation?"

After the Police van's attempt to bring down the Chinook, two minutes passed by and the Commanding Officer of the Quick Response Force and Regional Officer Commanding ISI were present on the spot. In a few minutes, the ISI dispatched a rapid briefing to the GHQ in Rawalpindi with this most important line, "A foreign aircraft is flying over the airspace of Abbottabad" (referring to the Chinook that came for backup but was not allowed to land).


The official, while continuing to share vital information, said that barely a few seconds had passed after the brief was sent to the GHQ that a high-command was issued from General Kayani to the then Air Chief Rao Qamar Suleiman, "Engage and Kill". People claim the F16s took flight at 1:05 am that night whereas the actual situation at hand was that General Kayani feared for the protection of the sensitive asset near that alleged compound. This makes it clear that the Pakistan Army was not aware of the actual 'Neptune Spear' fiasco but rather inferred that foreign aircraft must have penetrated into Abbottabad's airspace to attack the said asset. The Army's top hierarchy was focusing solely on the protection of that asset whose destruction could have caused a major blow to the Pakistani military.


Says an investigating officer of the ISI, "I do not think the first chopper (Sikorsky) was fired upon. It might be that a SEAL must have planted explosives inside the chopper himself and jumped off to give a dramatic zest to the whole staged play".


Meanwhile, the official who shared the backdrop of this story chipped in to add that in his personal opinion, what the investigating officer said can really be true. This, he says, is because ISI officials found a bag laden with explosives next to the compound. The official said it was similar to a proxy mine.


"The people present in the compound had their mouths taped and hands tied. They were not caged", said the official. "If they were kept in custody (by the Americans) for such a long time, as claimed by US officials in the media that the operation was planned back in 2006, then the "terrorists" should have been locked up or caged. They were seized but not caged which directly leads us to believe the people arrested were simply play-along assets "pawns in the game". Also, strains of Osama bin Laden's DNA could also have been planted. And who better to do this handiwork than a doctor. In this case, the CIA's asset, Dr. Shakil Afridi". http://www.terminalx.org/2012/05/exclusi...es-of.html

[Carsten Wiethoff]

The other interview referenced in your post, Magda, is also funny. It claims that OBL was not there in Abbotabad, because he had long been dead, possibly killed by KSM, who is a CIA asset.

Not that I believe anything of that stuff.
Of course, knowing would be better than believing, but it seems that knowledge about just anything is one of the rarest goods available, by design.