Doubts On "Official Story" of Bin Laden Killing
Posted By Russ Baker On August 17, 2011 @ 4:00 am In
Article Summary: When you look closely, nothing seems right about what will surely become the accepted account of the raid that nailed America's enemy number one. And then things get even weirderâ€¦
[SUP][1][/SUP]The father of the New Yorker writer who got the exclusive inside story of the bin Laden raid

[SUP][2][/SUP]he establishment media just keep getting worse. They're further and further from good, tough investigative journalism, and more prone to be pawns in complicated games that affect the public interest in untold ways. A significant recent example is The New Yorker's vaunted August 8 exclusive [SUP][3][/SUP] on the vanquishing of Osama bin Laden.
[SUP][4][/SUP]
The piece, trumpeted as the most detailed account to date of the May 1 raid in Abbottabad Pakistan, was an instant hit. "Got the chills half dozen times reading @NewYorker killing bin Laden tick tockâ€¦exquisite journalism," tweeted the digital director of the PBS show Frontline. The author, freelancer Nicholas Schmidle, was quickly featured on the Charlie Rose show, an influential determiner of "chattering class" opinion. Other news outlets rushed to praise the story as "exhaustive," "utterly compelling," and on and on.
To be sure, it is the kind of granular, heroic story that the public loves, that generates follow-up bestsellers and movie options. The takedown even has a Hollywood-esque code name: "Operation Neptune's Spear"
Here's the introduction to the mission commander, full of minute details that help give it a ring of authenticity and suggest the most intimate reportorial access:

James, a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer's frame that one might expect of a SEALhe is built more like a discus thrower. That night, he wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle. (Others SEALs had chosen the Heckler & Koch MP7.) A "blowout kit," for treating field trauma, was tucked into the small of James's back. Stuffed into one of his pockets was a laminated gridded map of the compound. In another pocket was a booklet with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside. He wore a noise-cancelling headset, which blocked out nearly everything besides his heartbeat.

On and on went the "tick-tock." Yet as Paul Farhi, a Washington Post reporter, noted [SUP][5][/SUP], that narrative was misleading in the extreme, because the New Yorker reporter never actually spoke to Jamesnor to a single one of James's fellow SEALs (who have never been identified or photographedeven from behindto protect their identity.) Instead, every word of Schmidle's narrative was provided to him by people who were not present at the raid. Complains Farhi:

â€¦a casual reader of the article wouldn't know that; neither the article nor an editor's note describes the sourcing for parts of the story. Schmidle, in fact, piles up so many details about some of the men, such as their thoughts at various times, that the article leaves a strong impression that he spoke with them directly.

That didn't trouble New Yorker editor David Remnick, according to Farhi:

Remnick says he's satisfied with the accuracy of the account. "The sources spoke to our fact-checkers," he said. "I know who they are."

But we don't.
On a story of this gravity, should we automatically join in with the huzzahs because it has the imprimatur of America's most respected magazine? Or would we be wise to approach it with caution?
*
Most of us are not the trusting naÃ¯fs we once were. And with good reason.
The list of consequential events packaged for us by media and Hollywood in unsatisfactory ways continues to grow. It starts, certainly, with the official version of the JFK assassination, widely discredited yet still carried forward by most major media organizations. (For more on that, see this [SUP][6][/SUP].) More and more people realize that the heroic Woodward & Bernstein story of Nixon's demise is deeply problematical. (I've written extensively on both of these in my book Family of Secrets [SUP][7][/SUP].)
And untold millions don't think we've heard the real (or at least complete) story of the phenomenal, complex success of those 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. Skeptics now include former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, who recently [SUP][8][/SUP] speculated that the hijackers may have been able to enter the US and move freely precisely because American intelligence hoped to recruit them as double agentsand that an ongoing cover-up is designed to [SUP][9][/SUP]hide this. And then, of course, there are the Pentagon's account of the heroic rescue of Jessica Lynch in Iraq, which turned out to be a hoax, and the Pentagon's fabricated account of the heroic battle death of former NFL player Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, who turned out to be a victim of friendly fire. These are just a few from scores of examples of deceit perpetrated upon the American people. Hardly the kind of track record to inspire confidence in official explanations with the imprimatur of the military and the CIA.
Whatever one thinks of these other matters, we're certainly now at a point where we ought to be prudent in embracing authorized accounts of the latest seismic event: the dramatic end to one of America's most reviled and storied nemeses.
[SUP][10][/SUP]The bin Laden raid presents us with every reason to be cautious. The government's initial claims about what transpired at that house in Abbottabad have changed, then changed again, with no proper explanation of the discrepancies. Even making allowances for human error in such shifting accounts, almost every aspect of what we were told requires a willing suspension of disbelieffrom the manner of Osama's death and burial to the purported pornography found at the site. (For more on these issues, see previous articles we wrote on the subject, here [SUP][11][/SUP], here [SUP][12][/SUP] and here [SUP][13][/SUP].)
Clarke's theory will seem less outrageous later, as we explore Saudi intelligence's crucial, and bizarre, role at the end of bin Laden's lifeworking directly with the man who now holds Clarke's job.
Add to all of this the discovery that the reporter providing this newest account wasn't even allowed to talk to any raid participantsand the magazine's lack of candor on this pointand you've got an almost unassailable case for treating the New Yorker story with extreme caution.
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We might begin by asking the question: Who provided The New Yorker with its exclusive, and what was their agenda in doing so? To try and sort out Schmidle's sources, I read through the piece carefully several times.
One person who spoke to the reporter, and who is identified by name is John O. Brennan, Obama's counterterrorism adviser. Brennan is quoted directly, briefly, near the top, describing to Schmidle pre-raid debate over whether such an operation would be a success or failure:

John Brennan, Obama's counterterrorism adviser, told me that the President's advisers began an "interrogation of the data, to see if, by that interrogation, you're going to disprove the theory that bin Laden was there."

[SUP][16][/SUP]The mere fact of Schmidle's reliance on Brennan at all should send up a flare for the cautious reader. After all, that's the very same Brennan who was the principal source of incorrect details in the hours and days after the raid. These included the claim that the SEALs encountered substantial armed resistance, not least from bin Laden himself; that it took them an astounding 40 minutes to get to bin Laden, and that the White House got to hear the soldiers' conversations in real time.
Here's a Washington Post account from Brennan published on May 3, less than 48 hours after the raid:

Half an hour had passed on the ground, but the American commandos raiding Osama bin Laden's Pakistani hideaway had yet to find their long-sought target.
â€¦The commandos swept methodically through the compound's main building, clearing one room and then another as they made their way to the upper floors where they expected to find bin Laden. As they did so, Obama administration officials in the White House Situation Room listened to the SEAL team's conversations over secure lines.
"The minutes passed like days," said John O. Brennan, the administration's chief counterterrorism adviser. "It was probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time, I think, in the lives of the people who were assembled."
Finally, shortly before 2 a.m. in Pakistan, the commandos burst into an upstairs room.Inside, an armed bin Laden took cover behind a woman, Brennan said. With a burst of gunfire, one of the longest and costliest manhunts in modern history was over.
.. The commandos moved inside, and finally reached bin Laden's upstairs living quarters after nearly 40 minutes on the ground.

[SUP][17][/SUP]Almost all that turns out to be hogwashaccording to the new account produced by The New Yorker three months later. An account that, again, it seems, comes courtesy of Brennan. The minutes did not pass like days. Bin Laden was not armed, and did not take cover behind a woman. And the commandoes most certainly were not on the ground for 40 minutes. Some of them were up the stairs to the higher floors almost in a flash, and it didn't take long for them to run into and kill bin Laden.
For another take, consider this account from NBC News' Pentagon correspondentalso reported the week after the raid two days after Brennan told the Washington Post a completely different story. This one appears to be based on a briefing from military officials who would have been likely to have good knowledge of the operational details:

According to the officials' account, as the first SEAL team moved into the compound, they took small-arms fire from the guest house in the compound. The SEALs returned fire, killing bin Laden's courier and the courier's wife, who died in the crossfire. It was the only time the SEALs were shot at.
The second SEAL team entered the first floor of the main residence and could see a man standing in the dark with one hand behind his back. Fearing he was hiding a weapon, the SEALs shot and killed the lone man, who turned out to be unarmed.
As the U.S. commandos moved through the house, they found several stashes of weapons and barricades, as if the residents were prepared for a violent and lengthy standoff which never materialized.
The SEALs then made their way up a staircase, where they ran into one of bin Laden's sons. The Americans immediately shot and killed the 19-year-old son, who was also unarmed, according to the officials.
Hearing the shots, bin Laden peered over the railing from the floor above. The SEALs fired but missed bin Laden, who ducked back into his bedroom. As the SEALs stormed up the stairs, two young girls ran from the room.
One SEAL scooped them up and carried them out of harm's way. The other two commandos stormed into bin Laden's bedroom. One of bin Laden's wives rushed toward the Navy SEAL, who shot her in the leg.
Then, without hesitation, the same commando turned his gun on bin Laden, standing in what appeared to be pajamas, and fired two quick shots, one to the chest and one to the head. Although there were weapons in that bedroom, bin Laden was also unarmed when he was shot.
Instead of a chaotic firefight, the U.S. officials said, the American commando assault was a precision operation, with SEALs moving carefully through the compound, room to room, floor to floor.
In fact, most of the operation was spent in what the military calls "exploiting the site," gathering up the computers, hard drives, cellphones and files that could provide valuable intelligence on al-Qaida operatives and potential operations worldwide.
The U.S. officials describing the operation said the SEALs carefully gathered up 22 women and children to ensure they were not harmed. Some of the women were put in "flexi-cuffs" the plastic straps used to bind someone's hands at the wrists, and left them for Pakistani security forces to discover.

*
Given that Brennan's initial version of the raid was strikingly erroneous, his later account to The New Yorker is suspect as well. So who else besides Brennan might have been Schmidle's sources? At one point in his piece, he cites an unnamed counterterrorism official:

A senior counterterrorism official who visited the JSOC redoubt described it as an enclave of unusual secrecy and discretion. "Everything they were working on was closely held," the official said.

Later, that same unnamed counterterrorism official is again cited, this time seeming to continue Brennan's narrative of the meeting before the raid, in which participants disagreed on the likely success of such a mission:

That day in Washington, Panetta convened more than a dozen senior C.I.A. officials and analysts for a final preparatory meeting. Panetta asked the participants, one by one, to declare how confident they were that bin Laden was inside the Abbottabad compound. The counterterrorism official told me that the percentages "ranged from forty per cent to ninety or ninety-five per cent," and added, "This was a circumstantial case."

From the story's construction, one could reasonably conclude that the unnamed counterterrorism official is indeed still just Brennan. If not, who could it be? How many different white House counterterrorism officials would have debriefed the SEALs, if indeed that is even their role? How many would have been privy to that planning meeting? And how many different officials would have gotten authorization to sum up the events of that important day for this New Yorker writer? Also, it's an old journalistic trick to quote the same source, on and off the record thereby giving the source extra cover when discussing particularly delicate matters.
So, we don't know whether the article was based on anything more than Brennan, under marching orders to clean up the conflicting accounts he originally put out.

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UNEXPLAINED DISPUTES
It's curious that the source chooses to emphasize the fundamental disagreement over whether the raid was a good idea. Presumably, there was a purpose in emphasizing this, but the New Yorker's "tick-tock", which is very light on analysis or context, doesn't tell us what it was. It may have been intended to show Obama as brave, inclined toward big risks (thereby running counter to his reputation)we can only guess.
[SUP][19][/SUP]This internal discord will get the attention of anyone who remembers all the assertions from intelligence officials over the years that bin Laden was almost certainly already deadeither of natural causes or killed at some previous time.
Here's a bit more from The New Yorker on officials' doubts going into the raid:

Several analysts from the National Counterterrorism Center were invited to critique the C.I.A.'s analysis; their confidence in the intelligence ranged between forty and sixty per cent. The center's director, Michael Leiter, said that it would be preferable to wait for stronger confirmation of bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad.

Those doubts are particularly interesting for several reasons: the CIA has had a long history of disputes between its covert action wing, which tends to advocate activity, and its analysis section, historically prone to caution. The action wing also has a history of publicizing its being rightwhen it could purport to be rightand covering up its failures. So when an insider chooses to make public these disagreements, we should be willing to consider motives.
This dispute can also be seen as an intriguing prologue to the rush to dump Bin Laden's body and not provide proof to the public that it was indeed bin Laden. What if it wasn't bin Laden that they killed? Would the government announce that after such a high-stakes operation? ("While we thought he'd be there, we accidentally killed someone else instead"? Seems unlikely.)
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Now, let us go to the next antechamber of this warren of shadowy entities and unstated agendas.
[SUP][20][/SUP]Who exactly wanted bin Laden shot rather than taken alive and interrogatedand why? There's been much discussion about the purported reasons for terminating him on sight, but the fact remains that he would have been a source of tremendous intelligence of real value to the safety of Americans and others.
Yet, early in the piece, Schmidle writes:

If all went according to plan, the SEALs would drop from the helicopters into the compound, overpower bin Laden's guards, shoot and kill him at close range, and then take the corpse back to Afghanistan.

That was the plan? Whose plan? We've never been explicitly told by the White House that such a decision had been made. In fact, we'd previously been informed that the president was glad to have the master plotter taken alive if he was unarmed and did not resist. So, that's a huge and problematical discrepancy that is only heightened by Schmidle's misleadingly matter-of-fact treatment of the matter.
GET ME RIYADH
If the justification for killing Osama presented in The New Yorker warrants concern, the account of howand whythey disposed of his body ought to send alarm bells clanging.
At the time of the raid, the decision to hastily dump Osama's body in the ocean rather than make it available for authoritative forensic examination was a highly controversial onethat only led to more speculation that the White House was hiding something. The justifications, including not wanting to bury him on land for fear of creating a shrine, were almost laughable.
So what do we learn about this from The New Yorker? It's truly bizarre: the SEALS themselves made the decision. That's strange enough. But then we learn that Brennan took it upon himself to verify that was the right decision. How did he do this? Not by speaking with the president or top military, diplomatic or legal brass. No, he called some foreignersget readythe Saudis, who told him that dumping at sea sounded like a good plan.
Here's Schmidle's account:

All along, the SEALs had planned to dump bin Laden's corpse into the seaa blunt way of ending the bin Laden myth. They had successfully pulled off a similar scheme before. During a DEVGRU helicopter raid inside Somalia in September, 2009, SEALs had killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of East Africa's top Al Qaeda leaders; Nabhan's corpse was then flown to a ship in the Indian Ocean, given proper Muslim rites, and thrown overboard. Before taking that step for bin Laden, however, John Brennan made a call. Brennan, who had been a C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, phoned a former counterpart in Saudi intelligence. Brennan told the man what had occurred in Abbottabad and informed him of the plan to deposit bin Laden's remains at sea. As Brennan knew, bin Laden's relatives were still a prominent family in the Kingdom, and Osama had once been a Saudi citizen. Did the Saudi government have any interest in taking the body? "Your plan sounds like a good one," the Saudi replied.

Let's consider this. The most wanted man in the world; substantive professional doubts about whether the man in the Abbottabad house is him; tremendous public doubts about whether it could even be him; the most important operation of the Obama presidency; yet the decision about what to do with the body is left to low-level operatives. Keep in mind SEALs are trained to follow orders given by others. They're expected to apply what they know to unexpected scenarios that come up, but the key strategic decisions arrived at in advanceare not theirs to make.
Even more strange that Brennan would discuss this with a foreign power. And not just any foreign power, but the regime that is inextricably linked with the domestically-influential family of bin Ladenand home to many of the hijackers who worked for him.
Is it just me, or does this sound preposterous? Obama's Homeland Security and Counterterrorism adviser is just winging it with key aspects of one of America's most important, complex and risky operations? And the Saudi government is the one deciding to discard the remains of a man from one of Saudi Arabia's most powerful families, before the public could receive proper proof of the identity of the body? A regime with a great deal at stake and perhaps plenty to hide.
Also please consider this important caveat: As we noted in a previous [SUP][12][/SUP] article, the claim that the body had already been positively identified via DNA has been disputed by a DNA expert who said that insufficient time had elapsed before the sea burial to complete such tests.
[SUP][21][/SUP]The line about Brennan himself having been a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia is just sort of dropped in there. No recognition of what it means that a person of that background was put into that position after 9/11, no recognition that a person of that background and those fraught personal connections is controlling this narrative. He's not just a "counterterrorism expert"he is a longtime member of an agency whose mandate includes the frequent use of disinformation. And one who has his own historic direct links to the Saudi regime, a key and problematical player in the larger chess game playing out.
[SUP][22][/SUP]It's relevant to note that Brennan is not only a career CIA officer (they say no one ever really leaves the Agency, no matter their new title) but one with a lot of baggage. He was deputy director of the CIA at the time of the 9/11 attacks. He was an adviser to Obama's presidential campaign, after which Obama initially planned to name him CIA director. That appointment was pulled, in part due to criticism from human rights advocates over statements he had made in support of sending terrorism suspects to countries where they might be tortured.
Of course, there could have been other sources besides Brennan. In addition to the unnamed "counterterrorism official" previously cited, the New Yorker mentions a "special operations officer," as in:

â€¦according to a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid.

Subsequent quotes from him indicate that this had to be a supervisory special ops officer. His comments are surprising:

"This wasn't a hard op," the special-operations officer told me. "It would be like hitting a target in McLean"the upscale Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.

Whoops! Here's a Special Ops guy saying the Special Ops raid was actually no big deal! Shouldn't that, if a valid assessment, get more attention? Especially given the endless praise and frequent statements of how difficult the operation was. I mean, the toughness and diciness of the Abbottabad mission is the prime reason we want to read the New Yorker's account in the first place!
To further underline the point, consider that this fellow is not alone in his assessment:

In the months after the raid, the media have frequently suggested that the Abbottabad operation was as challenging as Operation Eagle Claw and the "Black Hawk Down" incident, but the senior Defense Department official told me that "this was not one of three missions."â€¦. He likened the routine of evening raids to "mowing the lawn."

Why would a person overseeing an operation like this deflate the bubble of adoration? It doesn't seem helpful to the interests of Special Operations and it doesn't seem credible, either. So there's presumably a reason that this person isagain speaking to The New Yorker after this important exclusive has been carefully considered and strategized. We just don't know what it is, and the magazine doesn't even bother to wonder.
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Most of the other sources seem to play bit roles. One is "a senior adviser to the President" whose only comment is that Obama decided not to trust the Pakistanis with advance notice of the raidwhich we already knew. Another namedsource is Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser, who does not evince any intimate knowledge of the raid itself.
The New Yorker also includes a few other officials who brief Schmidle on general background, like a "senior defense department official" explaining the overall relationship between Special Operations and CIA personnel, and a named former CIA counsel explaining that the Abottabad raid amounted to "a complete incorporation of JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] into a C.I.A. operation."
That's only slipped into the article, but it is perhaps one of the most important aspects of the piece, along with a brief mention of the way in which former Iraq/Afghan commander General DavidPetraeus has gone to CIA while CIA director Panetta has been made Defense Secretary. (For more on these important but confusing games of high-level musical chairs, which were not deeply scrutinized in the conventional media, see our WhoWhatWhy pieces here [SUP][23][/SUP] and here [SUP][24][/SUP].)
This may sound too technical for your taste, but the takeaway point is that fundamental realignments are afoot in that vast, massively-funded, powerful and secretive part of the US government that is treated by thecorporate press almost as if it does not exist. The tales of internal intrigue that we do not hear would begin to provide us with the real narratives that are not ours to have.
In the New Yorker piece, we do learn lots of things we did not know beforefor example, that Special Ops considered tunneling in or coming in by foot rather than helicopter. We learn that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wanted to drop massive bombs on the house. General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shared that viewCartwright is one of the few who is directly identified as a source for Schmidle. That's important stuff, and worth more than brief mention. And, once again, we need more effort to try and understand why we are being told these things.

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"WE REALLY DIDN'T KNOWâ€¦WHAT WAS GOING ON"
About two-thirds of the article is a sort of scene-setter, a prologue to on-the-ground story we've all been waiting for. But when the big moment arrives, The New Yorker's Schmidle instead punts:

Meanwhile, James, the squadron commander, had breached one wall, crossed a section of the yard covered with trellises, breached a second wall, and joined up with the SEALs from helo one, who were entering the ground floor of the house. What happened next is not precisely clear. "I can tell you that there was a time period of almost twenty to twenty-five minutes where we really didn't know just exactly what was going on," Panetta said later, on "PBS NewsHour."
Until this moment, the operation had been monitored by dozens of defense, intelligence, and Administration officials watching the drone's video feed. The SEALs were not wearing helmet cams, contrary to a widely cited report by CBS. None of them had any previous knowledge of the house's floor plan, and they were further jostled by the awareness that they were possibly minutes away from ending the costliest manhunt in American history; as a result, some of their recollectionson which this account is basedmay be imprecise and, thus, subject to dispute.

Schmidle claims that the SEALs' "recollectionson which this account is based"are subject to dispute. But as I've noted, the article is NOT based on their recollections, but on what some source claims to Schmidle were their recollections. Why the summary may be imprecise and thus subject to dispute after it has been filtered by a person controlling the scenario, must be asked. Perhaps this is why The New Yorker is not permitted to speak directly to the SEALsbecause of what they could tell the magazine.
Now, killing the men who lived in the compound: First, the SEALs shot and killed the courier, who they say was armed, and his wife, who they say was not, when they emerged from the guesthouse. Then they killed the courier's brother inside the main house, who they say was armed. Then they moved up the stairs:

..three SEALs marched up the stairs. Midway up, they saw bin Laden's twenty-three-year-old son, Khalid, craning his neck around the corner. He then appeared at the top of the staircase with an AK-47. Khalid, who wore a white T-shirt with an overstretched neckline and had short hair and a clipped beard, fired down at the Americans. (The counterterrorism official claims that Khalid was unarmed, though still a threat worth taking seriously. "You have an adult male, late at night, in the dark, coming down the stairs at you in an Al Qaeda houseyour assumption is that you're encountering a hostile.") At least two of the SEALs shot back and killed Khalid.

Ok, that's pretty strange. First, Schmidle asserts that Khalid bin Laden was armed and fired with an AK-47. Then he quotes this counterterrorism officialwho could in fact be Brennansaying that Khalid was unarmed. Why does the New Yorker first run the "Khalid was armed" claim as a fact, and then include the official disclaimer? What's really going on here, even from the New Yorker's editorial standpoint?
Here's another such instance: a dispute over where Osama was when they first saw him:

Three SEALs shuttled past Khalid's body and blew open another metal cage, which obstructed the staircase leading to the third floor. Bounding up the unlit stairs, they scanned the railed landing. On the top stair, the lead SEAL swivelled right; with his night-vision goggles, he discerned that a tall, rangy man with a fist-length beard was peeking out from behind a bedroom door, ten feet away. The SEAL instantly sensed that it was Crankshaft [codename for Osama]. (The counterterrorism official asserts that the SEAL first saw bin Laden on the landing, and fired but missed.)

What's the purpose of all this? How good is intelligence work when they can't reconstruct whether the singular focus of the operation was first spotted peeking out from a doorway, or standing on the landing above them?
And then one of the most interesting passages, about the kill:

A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden's chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. "There was never any question of detaining or capturing himit wasn't a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees," the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.)

Uh-oh. So who is this Special Operations officer? He is directly disputing the administration's claim on what surely matters greatlywhat were President Obama's intentions here? And did they always plan to just ignore them? That The New Yorker just drops this in with no further analysis or context is, simply put, shocking.
It seems almost as if Panetta, Obama, and the people in the story who most closely approximate actual representatives of the public in a functioning democracy, were basically cut off from observing what went down that dayor from influencing what transpired.
Consider this statement from Panetta, not included in the New Yorker piece:

"Once those teams went into the compound I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we really didn't know just exactly what was going on. And there were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information.
"We had some observation of the approach there, but we did not have direct flow of information as to the actual conduct of the operation itself as they were going through the compound."

Panetta's "lost 25 minutes" needs to be seen in the context of a man with civilian roots, notwithstanding two mid-60s years as a Lt. in military intel: Former Congressman, Clinton White House budget chief and Chief of Staff, credentials with civil rights and environment movementsa fellow with real distance from the true spook/military mojo.
Taken together, here's what we have: President Obama did not know exactly what was going on. He did not decide that bin Laden should be shot. And he did not decide to dump his body in the ocean. The CIA and its Special Ops allies made all the decisions.
Then Brennan, the CIA's man, put out the version that CIA wanted. (Keep in mind that, as noted earlier, CIA was really running the operationwith Special Ops under its direction).
What we're looking at, folks, is the reality of democracy in America: A permanent entrenched covert establishment that marches to its own drummer or to drummers unknown. It's exactly the kind of thing that never gets reported. Too scary. Too real. Better to dismiss this line of inquiry as too "conspiracy theory."
If that sounds like hyperbole, let me add this rather significant consideration. It is the background of Nicholas Schmidle, the freelancer who wrote the New Yorker piece. It may give us insight into how he landed this extraordinary exclusive on this extraordinarily sensitive matterinformation again, significantly, not shared by The New Yorker with its readers:
[SUP][26][/SUP]Schmidle's father is Marine Lt. General Robert E. "Rooster" Schmidle Jr. General Schmidle served as Commanding Officer of Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force (Experimental)that's essentially Special Operations akin to Navy SEALs. In recent years, he was "assistant deputy commandant for Programs and Resources (Programs)"where, among other things, he oversaw "irregular warfare." (See various, including contract specs here [SUP][27][/SUP] on "Special Operations," and picture caption here [SUP][28][/SUP]) In 2010, he moved into another piece of this, when Obama appointed him deputy commander, U.S. Cyber Command. Cumulatively, this makes the author's father a very important man in precisely the sort of circles who care how the raid is publicly portrayedand who would be quite intimate with some of the folks hunkering down with Obama in the Situation Room on the big day.
[SUP][29][/SUP]You can see a photo [SUP][30][/SUP] of Gen. Schmidle on a 2010 panel [SUP][31][/SUP] about "Warring Futures." Event co-sponsors include Slate magazine and the New America Foundation, both of which, according to Nicholas Schmidle's website [SUP][32][/SUP], have also provided Schmidle's son with an ongoing perch (with Slate giving him a platform for numerous articles from war zones and the foundation employing him as a Fellow.) These parallel relationships grow more disturbing with contemplation.
*
So let's get back to the question, Who is driving this Ship of State?
First, consider this passage:

Obama returned to the White House at two o'clock, after playing nine holes of golf at Andrews Air Force Base. The Black Hawks departed from Jalalabad thirty minutes later. Just before four o'clock, Panetta announced to the group in the Situation Room that the helicopters were approaching Abbottabad.

[SUP][33][/SUP]To be really useful reporting here, rather than just meaningless "color", we'd need some context. Was the golf game's purpose to blow off steam at an especially tense time? Did Obama not think it important enough for him to be constantly present in the hours leading up to the raid? Is this typical of his schedule when huge things are happening? We desperately need a more realistic sense of what presidents do, how much they're really in charge, or, instead, figureheads for unnamed individuals who make most of the critical decisions.
Here's something just as strange: we are told the President took a commanding role in determining key operational tactics, but then didn't seem interested in important details, after the fact.

Forty-five minutes after the Black Hawks departed, four MH-47 Chinooks launched from the same runway in Jalalabad. Two of them flew to the border, staying on the Afghan side; the other two proceeded into Pakistan. Deploying four Chinooks was a last-minute decision made after President Barack Obama said he wanted to feel assured that the Americans could "fight their way out of Pakistan."

[SUP][34][/SUP]Now, consider the following climactic New Yorker account of Obama meeting with the squadron commander after it's all over, with bin Laden dead and the troops home and safe. Schmidle decides to call the commander "Jamesâ€¦the names of all the covert operators mentioned in this story have been changed." The anecdote will feature a canine, one who, in true furry dog story fashion, had already been introduced early in the New Yorker piece, as "Cairo" (it's not clear whether the dog's name, too, was changed):

As James talked about the raid, he mentioned Cairo's role. "There was a dog?" Obama interrupted. James nodded and said that Cairo was in an adjoining room, muzzled, at the request of the Secret Service.
"I want to meet that dog," Obama said.
"If you want to meet the dog, Mr. President, I advise you to bring treats," James joked. Obama went over to pet Cairo, but the dog's muzzle was left on.

Here's the ending:

Before the President returned to Washington, he posed for photographs with each team member and spoke with many of them, but he left one thing unsaid. He never asked who fired the kill shot, and the SEALs never volunteered to tell him.

Why did the president not want to ask for specifics on the most important parts of the operationbut seemed so interested in a dog that participated? While it is certainly plausible that this happened, we should be wary of one of the oldest p.r. tricks aroundget people cooing over an animal, while the real action is elsewhere.
Certainly, Obama's reaction differs dramatically from that of other previous presidents who always demanded detailed briefings and would have stayed on top of it all throughoutincluding fellow Democrats JFK, Carter and Clinton. At minimum, it shows a degree of caution or ceremony based upon a desire not to know too muchor an understanding that he may not ask. Does anyone doubt that Bill Clinton would have been on watch 24/7 during this operation, parsing legal, political and operational details throughout, and would have demanded to know who felled America's most wanted?
Summing up about the reliability of this account, which is now likely to become required reading for every student in America, long into the future:
It is based on reporting by a man who fails to disclose that he never spoke to the people who conducted the raid, or that his father has a long background himself running such operations (this even suggests the possibility that Nicholas Schmidle's own father could have been one of those "unnamed sources.")

It seems to have depended heavily on trusting second-hand accounts by people with a poor track record for accurate summations, and an incentive to spin.

The alleged decisions on killing bin Laden and disposing of his body lack credibility.

The DNA evidence that the SEALs actually got their man is questionable.

Though certain members of Congress say they have seen photos of the body (or, to be precise, a body), the rest of us have not seen anything.

Promised photos of the ceremonial dumping of the body at sea have not materialized.

The eyewitnesses from the houseincluding the surviving wiveshave disappeared without comment.

We weren't allowed to hear from the raid participants. And on August 6, seventeen Navy SEALs died when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan. We're told that fifteen of them came, amazingly, from the same SEAL Team 6 that carried out the Abbottabad raidbut that none of the dead were present for the raid. We do get to hear the stories of those men, and their names [SUP][35][/SUP].
Of course, if any of those men had been in the Abbottabad raidor knew anything about it of broad public interest, we'd be none the wiserbecause, the only "reliable sources" still available (and featured by the New Yorker)are military and intelligence professionals, coming out of a long tradition of cover-ups and fabrications.
Meanwhile, we have this president, this one who according to the magazine article didn't ask about the core issueswhy this man was killed, who killed him, under whose orders, what would be done with the body.
Well, he may not want answers. But we ought to want them. Otherwise, it's all just a game.

[/url]
[URL="http://whowhatwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Navy-Seals-Bloodbath-In-Abbottabad-Game-Cover1.jpg"]

Photo Sources: 1 [SUP][36][/SUP],2 [SUP][37][/SUP],3 [SUP][38][/SUP],4 [SUP][39][/SUP],5 [SUP][40][/SUP],6 [SUP][41][/SUP],7 [SUP][42][/SUP],8 [SUP][30][/SUP],9 [SUP][43][/SUP],10 [SUP][44][/SUP],11 [SUP][45][/SUP],12 [SUP][46][/SUP],13 [SUP][47][/SUP],14 [SUP][48][/SUP],15 [SUP][49][/SUP],16 [SUP][50][/SUP],17 [SUP][51][/SUP],18 [SUP][52][/SUP]

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[5] noted: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/...story.html
[6] this: http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/07/27/the-ny-...tting-old/
[7] Family of Secrets: http://www.amazon.com/Family-Secrets-Ame...608190064/
[8] recently: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20...harge.html
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[11] here: http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/05/12/demandi...t-is-wary/
[12] here: http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/05/05/more-qu...bin-laden/
[13] here: http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/05/03/12-ques...bin-laden/
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[28] here: http://www.dvidshub.net/news/38250/ii-me...kpVNILmuAk
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[31] panel: http://www.newamerica.net/events/2010/warring_futures
[32] website: http://www.nicholasschmidle.com/bio.html
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[52] 18: http://dailyqi.com/wp-content/uploads/20...mmons..jpg
[url=http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/08/17/raidbinladen/][/url]

Ed Jewett · 29-09-2011, 07:03 AM

We re-awakwen this long-dormant thread to inform you that Ossama bin Laden is still dead.

And we won't show you the photos to prove it.

The CIA has 52 separate photos and videos of Osama bin Ladens body, the U.S. raid that killed him, and his burial at sea, according to a Justice Department document filed earlier this week. A top CIA official argues that the government is "wholly exempt" from releasing the images, however, because publication might inspire terror attacks on U.S. targets.
The image count came in response to a lawsuit by the conservative group Judicial Watch, which filed a Freedom of Information Act request on May 4, three days after the raid on bin Laden's Pakistan compound, for the release of the death images. The Department of Justice responded with a declaration from John Bennett, director of the National Clandestine Service of the CIA, arguing that disclosure of the images is a security risk.
Bennett reports that the CIA conducted a search of its records to determine how many images of the raid and its aftermath it possessed. "The CIA located a total of fifty-two (52) unique records that are responsive to Plaintiff's FOIA request. These records are photographs and/or video recordings taken of UBL on or about 1 May 2011, the day that the United States conducted an operation that resulted in his death."

http://www.bobtuskin.com/2011/09/28/cia-...th-photos/
Read More: [/url]http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cia-list-g...d=14626404
***

September 27, 2011

Categories:

FOIA

CIA, Pentagon fight to keep Osama bin Laden death photos secret

Photos and videos of Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden after he was killed in May in a U.S. military/Central Intelligence Agency raid in Pakistan should not be released publicly because they would reveal military and intelligence secrets and could lead to violence against U.S. personnel, the Obama administration argued in papers filed in federal court in Washington late Monday night.
The new filings from the Justice Department provide scant details about the imagery, but CIA National Clandestine Service Director John Bennett wrote that the CIA has "52 unique....photographs and/or videorecordings" depicting bin Laden during or after the May operation. Bennett did not break down the tally further, but said all the imagery is classified "TOP SECRET," meaning that disclosure of the material could lead to "exceptionally grave damage" to U.S. national security.
"All of the responsive records are the product of a highly sensitive, overseas operation that was conducted under the direction of the CIA," Bennett wrote, arguing that disclosure of the information would reveal "intelligence activities and/or methods." He called the photos "gruesome," and said they depict the gunshot wound to bin Laden's head. It is unclear whether his descriptions referred to all the images and videos, or just some of them.
The motion for summary judgment and supporting declarations ask U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg to rule for the government in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought in May by Judicial Watch. The conservative watchdog group sued the Defense Department after it failed to comply with the group's request for the bin Laden imagery. The suit was broadened in June to name the CIA as a defendant.
While the Justice Department's motion is backed by declarations from high ranking officials at the Pentagon and CIA, the government lawyers make clear that their marching orders come from the top. Near its outset, the brief quotes President Barack Obama's comments on the issue during a "60 Minutes" interview in May.
"It is important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence. As a propaganda tool. You know, that's not who we are. You know, we don't trot out this stuff as trophies," Obama said. "We don't need to spike the football."
The brief includes Obama's claim that then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and intelligence officials "all" agreed that releasing the images would "create some national security risk." The legal papers do not mention that before Obama made the decision to keep the images secret, then-CIA director Leon Panetta said there was no "question that ultimately a photograph would be presented to the public." (Panetta has since become defense secretary.)
The government's filings Monday were also accompanied by a declaration from Admiral William McRaven, who heads the U.S. Special Operations Command and commands the Navy SEALs who carried out the bin Laden raid. McRaven argues that release of the imagery "could reasonably be expected to...make the special operations unit that participated in this operation and its members more readily identifiable in the future." Portions of McRaven's arguments were classified and filed under seal.
In another declaration, the head of operations for the military's joint staff, Lt. Gen. Robert Neller, argued that release of the bin Laden death imagery could lead to violence against U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan, Afghan civilians and police, Afghans working with the U.S., and U.S. citizens worldwide. Neller also said releasing the images could "aid the recruitment efforts...of insurgent elements" in Afghanistan, "weaken the new Democratic government of Afghanistan, and add extremist pressures on several of our regional allies."
The legal fight over the bin Laden photos has produced some disagreement among FOIA experts. Some expect the government to prevail in the case without much difficulty because courts are traditionally very deferential to the executive branch in litigation involving national security, particularly FOIA cases. However, a few FOIA specialists have said aspects of the government's arguments against disclosure is weaker than in other cases, chiefly because of reliance on the harms that stem in essence from the public relations impact the imagery could have.
Judicial Watch was not the only organization to request the photos and video.Several news organizations, including the Associated Press and POLITICO, also did so.
The government's new filings appear to offer some openings for attack on the part of those pressing for disclosure.
First, while the arguments for withholding imagery from the raid and its immediate aftermath are legally strong, those for withholding the images of bin Laden's burial seem substantially weaker. It's hard to see how that event implicates any national security secrets. Second, the CIA's claim that none of the images or videos can be released even in part seems conclusory. A heavily-edited video of bin Laden's burial, for example, might or might not not be very interesting, but for that same reason it seems less likely to produce the negative consequences the government warns about.
The government filings claim that the Defense Department found no imagery responsive to the requests. Sources previously told POLITICO that at least some of the images were on a secure, classified interagency network accessible to individuals at various agencies. The new court filings don't make clear who took the photos and video. If they were in posession of military personnel at the time the FOIA requests were made or thereafter, some of the arguments for disclosure could be strengthened. However, it's also possible that the courts may accept that the entire operation is an intelligence activity that the CIA is entitled to keep secret or disclose as it sees fit.
Judicial Watch is scheduled to respond to the government's filings by October 24. Boasberg, an Obama appointee confirmed to the district court in March of this year, is unlikely to rule before December.
For those who want to dive further into the details: the government's motion is posted here, Bennett's declaration is posted here, McRaven's redacted declaration is posted here, and Neller's is here.
[URL="http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerstein/0911/CIA_Pentagon_fight_to_keep_Bin_Laden_photos_secret.html#"]

Posted by Josh Gerstein 01:27 AM
Tags:

comments ( 121 )

***Jan Klimkowski*** · 29-09-2011, 09:52 PM

Quote:Photos and videos of Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden after he was killed in May in a U.S. military/Central Intelligence Agency raid in Pakistan should not be released publicly because they would reveal military and intelligence secrets

:lol::lol::lol:

What military and intelligence secrets would those be?????????

***Peter Lemkin*** · 02-12-2011, 06:41 PM

Doubts On "Official Story" of Bin Laden Killing
Posted By Russ Baker On August 17, 2011 @ 4:00 am In
Article Summary: When you look closely, nothing seems right about what will surely become the accepted account of the raid that nailed America's enemy number one. And then things get even weirderâ€¦
[SUP][1][/SUP]The father of the New Yorker writer who got the exclusive inside story of the bin Laden raid

[SUP][2][/SUP]he establishment media just keep getting worse. They're further and further from good, tough investigative journalism, and more prone to be pawns in complicated games that affect the public interest in untold ways. A significant recent example is The New Yorker's vaunted August 8 exclusive [SUP][3][/SUP] on the vanquishing of Osama bin Laden.
[SUP][4][/SUP]
The piece, trumpeted as the most detailed account to date of the May 1 raid in Abbottabad Pakistan, was an instant hit. "Got the chills half dozen times reading @NewYorker killing bin Laden tick tockâ€¦exquisite journalism," tweeted the digital director of the PBS show Frontline. The author, freelancer Nicholas Schmidle, was quickly featured on the Charlie Rose show, an influential determiner of "chattering class" opinion. Other news outlets rushed to praise the story as "exhaustive," "utterly compelling," and on and on.
To be sure, it is the kind of granular, heroic story that the public loves, that generates follow-up bestsellers and movie options. The takedown even has a Hollywood-esque code name: "Operation Neptune's Spear"
Here's the introduction to the mission commander, full of minute details that help give it a ring of authenticity and suggest the most intimate reportorial access:

James, a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer's frame that one might expect of a SEALhe is built more like a discus thrower. That night, he wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle. (Others SEALs had chosen the Heckler & Koch MP7.) A "blowout kit," for treating field trauma, was tucked into the small of James's back. Stuffed into one of his pockets was a laminated gridded map of the compound. In another pocket was a booklet with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside. He wore a noise-cancelling headset, which blocked out nearly everything besides his heartbeat.

On and on went the "tick-tock." Yet as Paul Farhi, a Washington Post reporter, noted [SUP][5][/SUP], that narrative was misleading in the extreme, because the New Yorker reporter never actually spoke to Jamesnor to a single one of James's fellow SEALs (who have never been identified or photographedeven from behindto protect their identity.) Instead, every word of Schmidle's narrative was provided to him by people who were not present at the raid. Complains Farhi:

â€¦a casual reader of the article wouldn't know that; neither the article nor an editor's note describes the sourcing for parts of the story. Schmidle, in fact, piles up so many details about some of the men, such as their thoughts at various times, that the article leaves a strong impression that he spoke with them directly.

That didn't trouble New Yorker editor David Remnick, according to Farhi:

Remnick says he's satisfied with the accuracy of the account. "The sources spoke to our fact-checkers," he said. "I know who they are."

But we don't.
On a story of this gravity, should we automatically join in with the huzzahs because it has the imprimatur of America's most respected magazine? Or would we be wise to approach it with caution?
*
Most of us are not the trusting naÃ¯fs we once were. And with good reason.
The list of consequential events packaged for us by media and Hollywood in unsatisfactory ways continues to grow. It starts, certainly, with the official version of the JFK assassination, widely discredited yet still carried forward by most major media organizations. (For more on that, see this [SUP][6][/SUP].) More and more people realize that the heroic Woodward & Bernstein story of Nixon's demise is deeply problematical. (I've written extensively on both of these in my book Family of Secrets [SUP][7][/SUP].)
And untold millions don't think we've heard the real (or at least complete) story of the phenomenal, complex success of those 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. Skeptics now include former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, who recently [SUP][8][/SUP] speculated that the hijackers may have been able to enter the US and move freely precisely because American intelligence hoped to recruit them as double agentsand that an ongoing cover-up is designed to [SUP][9][/SUP]hide this. And then, of course, there are the Pentagon's account of the heroic rescue of Jessica Lynch in Iraq, which turned out to be a hoax, and the Pentagon's fabricated account of the heroic battle death of former NFL player Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, who turned out to be a victim of friendly fire. These are just a few from scores of examples of deceit perpetrated upon the American people. Hardly the kind of track record to inspire confidence in official explanations with the imprimatur of the military and the CIA.
Whatever one thinks of these other matters, we're certainly now at a point where we ought to be prudent in embracing authorized accounts of the latest seismic event: the dramatic end to one of America's most reviled and storied nemeses.
[SUP][10][/SUP]The bin Laden raid presents us with every reason to be cautious. The government's initial claims about what transpired at that house in Abbottabad have changed, then changed again, with no proper explanation of the discrepancies. Even making allowances for human error in such shifting accounts, almost every aspect of what we were told requires a willing suspension of disbelieffrom the manner of Osama's death and burial to the purported pornography found at the site. (For more on these issues, see previous articles we wrote on the subject, here [SUP][11][/SUP], here [SUP][12][/SUP] and here [SUP][13][/SUP].)
Clarke's theory will seem less outrageous later, as we explore Saudi intelligence's crucial, and bizarre, role at the end of bin Laden's lifeworking directly with the man who now holds Clarke's job.
Add to all of this the discovery that the reporter providing this newest account wasn't even allowed to talk to any raid participantsand the magazine's lack of candor on this pointand you've got an almost unassailable case for treating the New Yorker story with extreme caution.
*

Continue to page 2 of 4 [SUP][14][/SUP]

We might begin by asking the question: Who provided The New Yorker with its exclusive, and what was their agenda in doing so? To try and sort out Schmidle's sources, I read through the piece carefully several times.
One person who spoke to the reporter, and who is identified by name is John O. Brennan, Obama's counterterrorism adviser. Brennan is quoted directly, briefly, near the top, describing to Schmidle pre-raid debate over whether such an operation would be a success or failure:

John Brennan, Obama's counterterrorism adviser, told me that the President's advisers began an "interrogation of the data, to see if, by that interrogation, you're going to disprove the theory that bin Laden was there."

[SUP][16][/SUP]The mere fact of Schmidle's reliance on Brennan at all should send up a flare for the cautious reader. After all, that's the very same Brennan who was the principal source of incorrect details in the hours and days after the raid. These included the claim that the SEALs encountered substantial armed resistance, not least from bin Laden himself; that it took them an astounding 40 minutes to get to bin Laden, and that the White House got to hear the soldiers' conversations in real time.
Here's a Washington Post account from Brennan published on May 3, less than 48 hours after the raid:

Half an hour had passed on the ground, but the American commandos raiding Osama bin Laden's Pakistani hideaway had yet to find their long-sought target.
â€¦The commandos swept methodically through the compound's main building, clearing one room and then another as they made their way to the upper floors where they expected to find bin Laden. As they did so, Obama administration officials in the White House Situation Room listened to the SEAL team's conversations over secure lines.
"The minutes passed like days," said John O. Brennan, the administration's chief counterterrorism adviser. "It was probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time, I think, in the lives of the people who were assembled."
Finally, shortly before 2 a.m. in Pakistan, the commandos burst into an upstairs room.Inside, an armed bin Laden took cover behind a woman, Brennan said. With a burst of gunfire, one of the longest and costliest manhunts in modern history was over.
.. The commandos moved inside, and finally reached bin Laden's upstairs living quarters after nearly 40 minutes on the ground.

[SUP][17][/SUP]Almost all that turns out to be hogwashaccording to the new account produced by The New Yorker three months later. An account that, again, it seems, comes courtesy of Brennan. The minutes did not pass like days. Bin Laden was not armed, and did not take cover behind a woman. And the commandoes most certainly were not on the ground for 40 minutes. Some of them were up the stairs to the higher floors almost in a flash, and it didn't take long for them to run into and kill bin Laden.
For another take, consider this account from NBC News' Pentagon correspondentalso reported the week after the raid two days after Brennan told the Washington Post a completely different story. This one appears to be based on a briefing from military officials who would have been likely to have good knowledge of the operational details:

According to the officials' account, as the first SEAL team moved into the compound, they took small-arms fire from the guest house in the compound. The SEALs returned fire, killing bin Laden's courier and the courier's wife, who died in the crossfire. It was the only time the SEALs were shot at.
The second SEAL team entered the first floor of the main residence and could see a man standing in the dark with one hand behind his back. Fearing he was hiding a weapon, the SEALs shot and killed the lone man, who turned out to be unarmed.
As the U.S. commandos moved through the house, they found several stashes of weapons and barricades, as if the residents were prepared for a violent and lengthy standoff which never materialized.
The SEALs then made their way up a staircase, where they ran into one of bin Laden's sons. The Americans immediately shot and killed the 19-year-old son, who was also unarmed, according to the officials.
Hearing the shots, bin Laden peered over the railing from the floor above. The SEALs fired but missed bin Laden, who ducked back into his bedroom. As the SEALs stormed up the stairs, two young girls ran from the room.
One SEAL scooped them up and carried them out of harm's way. The other two commandos stormed into bin Laden's bedroom. One of bin Laden's wives rushed toward the Navy SEAL, who shot her in the leg.
Then, without hesitation, the same commando turned his gun on bin Laden, standing in what appeared to be pajamas, and fired two quick shots, one to the chest and one to the head. Although there were weapons in that bedroom, bin Laden was also unarmed when he was shot.
Instead of a chaotic firefight, the U.S. officials said, the American commando assault was a precision operation, with SEALs moving carefully through the compound, room to room, floor to floor.
In fact, most of the operation was spent in what the military calls "exploiting the site," gathering up the computers, hard drives, cellphones and files that could provide valuable intelligence on al-Qaida operatives and potential operations worldwide.
The U.S. officials describing the operation said the SEALs carefully gathered up 22 women and children to ensure they were not harmed. Some of the women were put in "flexi-cuffs" the plastic straps used to bind someone's hands at the wrists, and left them for Pakistani security forces to discover.

*
Given that Brennan's initial version of the raid was strikingly erroneous, his later account to The New Yorker is suspect as well. So who else besides Brennan might have been Schmidle's sources? At one point in his piece, he cites an unnamed counterterrorism official:

A senior counterterrorism official who visited the JSOC redoubt described it as an enclave of unusual secrecy and discretion. "Everything they were working on was closely held," the official said.

Later, that same unnamed counterterrorism official is again cited, this time seeming to continue Brennan's narrative of the meeting before the raid, in which participants disagreed on the likely success of such a mission:

That day in Washington, Panetta convened more than a dozen senior C.I.A. officials and analysts for a final preparatory meeting. Panetta asked the participants, one by one, to declare how confident they were that bin Laden was inside the Abbottabad compound. The counterterrorism official told me that the percentages "ranged from forty per cent to ninety or ninety-five per cent," and added, "This was a circumstantial case."

From the story's construction, one could reasonably conclude that the unnamed counterterrorism official is indeed still just Brennan. If not, who could it be? How many different white House counterterrorism officials would have debriefed the SEALs, if indeed that is even their role? How many would have been privy to that planning meeting? And how many different officials would have gotten authorization to sum up the events of that important day for this New Yorker writer? Also, it's an old journalistic trick to quote the same source, on and off the record thereby giving the source extra cover when discussing particularly delicate matters.
So, we don't know whether the article was based on anything more than Brennan, under marching orders to clean up the conflicting accounts he originally put out.

Continue to page 3 of 4 [SUP][18][/SUP]

UNEXPLAINED DISPUTES
It's curious that the source chooses to emphasize the fundamental disagreement over whether the raid was a good idea. Presumably, there was a purpose in emphasizing this, but the New Yorker's "tick-tock", which is very light on analysis or context, doesn't tell us what it was. It may have been intended to show Obama as brave, inclined toward big risks (thereby running counter to his reputation)we can only guess.
[SUP][19][/SUP]This internal discord will get the attention of anyone who remembers all the assertions from intelligence officials over the years that bin Laden was almost certainly already deadeither of natural causes or killed at some previous time.
Here's a bit more from The New Yorker on officials' doubts going into the raid:

Several analysts from the National Counterterrorism Center were invited to critique the C.I.A.'s analysis; their confidence in the intelligence ranged between forty and sixty per cent. The center's director, Michael Leiter, said that it would be preferable to wait for stronger confirmation of bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad.

Those doubts are particularly interesting for several reasons: the CIA has had a long history of disputes between its covert action wing, which tends to advocate activity, and its analysis section, historically prone to caution. The action wing also has a history of publicizing its being rightwhen it could purport to be rightand covering up its failures. So when an insider chooses to make public these disagreements, we should be willing to consider motives.
This dispute can also be seen as an intriguing prologue to the rush to dump Bin Laden's body and not provide proof to the public that it was indeed bin Laden. What if it wasn't bin Laden that they killed? Would the government announce that after such a high-stakes operation? ("While we thought he'd be there, we accidentally killed someone else instead"? Seems unlikely.)
*
Now, let us go to the next antechamber of this warren of shadowy entities and unstated agendas.
[SUP][20][/SUP]Who exactly wanted bin Laden shot rather than taken alive and interrogatedand why? There's been much discussion about the purported reasons for terminating him on sight, but the fact remains that he would have been a source of tremendous intelligence of real value to the safety of Americans and others.
Yet, early in the piece, Schmidle writes:

If all went according to plan, the SEALs would drop from the helicopters into the compound, overpower bin Laden's guards, shoot and kill him at close range, and then take the corpse back to Afghanistan.

That was the plan? Whose plan? We've never been explicitly told by the White House that such a decision had been made. In fact, we'd previously been informed that the president was glad to have the master plotter taken alive if he was unarmed and did not resist. So, that's a huge and problematical discrepancy that is only heightened by Schmidle's misleadingly matter-of-fact treatment of the matter.
GET ME RIYADH
If the justification for killing Osama presented in The New Yorker warrants concern, the account of howand whythey disposed of his body ought to send alarm bells clanging.
At the time of the raid, the decision to hastily dump Osama's body in the ocean rather than make it available for authoritative forensic examination was a highly controversial onethat only led to more speculation that the White House was hiding something. The justifications, including not wanting to bury him on land for fear of creating a shrine, were almost laughable.
So what do we learn about this from The New Yorker? It's truly bizarre: the SEALS themselves made the decision. That's strange enough. But then we learn that Brennan took it upon himself to verify that was the right decision. How did he do this? Not by speaking with the president or top military, diplomatic or legal brass. No, he called some foreignersget readythe Saudis, who told him that dumping at sea sounded like a good plan.
Here's Schmidle's account:

All along, the SEALs had planned to dump bin Laden's corpse into the seaa blunt way of ending the bin Laden myth. They had successfully pulled off a similar scheme before. During a DEVGRU helicopter raid inside Somalia in September, 2009, SEALs had killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of East Africa's top Al Qaeda leaders; Nabhan's corpse was then flown to a ship in the Indian Ocean, given proper Muslim rites, and thrown overboard. Before taking that step for bin Laden, however, John Brennan made a call. Brennan, who had been a C.I.A. station chief in Riyadh, phoned a former counterpart in Saudi intelligence. Brennan told the man what had occurred in Abbottabad and informed him of the plan to deposit bin Laden's remains at sea. As Brennan knew, bin Laden's relatives were still a prominent family in the Kingdom, and Osama had once been a Saudi citizen. Did the Saudi government have any interest in taking the body? "Your plan sounds like a good one," the Saudi replied.

Let's consider this. The most wanted man in the world; substantive professional doubts about whether the man in the Abbottabad house is him; tremendous public doubts about whether it could even be him; the most important operation of the Obama presidency; yet the decision about what to do with the body is left to low-level operatives. Keep in mind SEALs are trained to follow orders given by others. They're expected to apply what they know to unexpected scenarios that come up, but the key strategic decisions arrived at in advanceare not theirs to make.
Even more strange that Brennan would discuss this with a foreign power. And not just any foreign power, but the regime that is inextricably linked with the domestically-influential family of bin Ladenand home to many of the hijackers who worked for him.
Is it just me, or does this sound preposterous? Obama's Homeland Security and Counterterrorism adviser is just winging it with key aspects of one of America's most important, complex and risky operations? And the Saudi government is the one deciding to discard the remains of a man from one of Saudi Arabia's most powerful families, before the public could receive proper proof of the identity of the body? A regime with a great deal at stake and perhaps plenty to hide.
Also please consider this important caveat: As we noted in a previous [SUP][12][/SUP] article, the claim that the body had already been positively identified via DNA has been disputed by a DNA expert who said that insufficient time had elapsed before the sea burial to complete such tests.
[SUP][21][/SUP]The line about Brennan himself having been a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia is just sort of dropped in there. No recognition of what it means that a person of that background was put into that position after 9/11, no recognition that a person of that background and those fraught personal connections is controlling this narrative. He's not just a "counterterrorism expert"he is a longtime member of an agency whose mandate includes the frequent use of disinformation. And one who has his own historic direct links to the Saudi regime, a key and problematical player in the larger chess game playing out.
[SUP][22][/SUP]It's relevant to note that Brennan is not only a career CIA officer (they say no one ever really leaves the Agency, no matter their new title) but one with a lot of baggage. He was deputy director of the CIA at the time of the 9/11 attacks. He was an adviser to Obama's presidential campaign, after which Obama initially planned to name him CIA director. That appointment was pulled, in part due to criticism from human rights advocates over statements he had made in support of sending terrorism suspects to countries where they might be tortured.
Of course, there could have been other sources besides Brennan. In addition to the unnamed "counterterrorism official" previously cited, the New Yorker mentions a "special operations officer," as in:

â€¦according to a special-operations officer who is deeply familiar with the bin Laden raid.

Subsequent quotes from him indicate that this had to be a supervisory special ops officer. His comments are surprising:

"This wasn't a hard op," the special-operations officer told me. "It would be like hitting a target in McLean"the upscale Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.

Whoops! Here's a Special Ops guy saying the Special Ops raid was actually no big deal! Shouldn't that, if a valid assessment, get more attention? Especially given the endless praise and frequent statements of how difficult the operation was. I mean, the toughness and diciness of the Abbottabad mission is the prime reason we want to read the New Yorker's account in the first place!
To further underline the point, consider that this fellow is not alone in his assessment:

In the months after the raid, the media have frequently suggested that the Abbottabad operation was as challenging as Operation Eagle Claw and the "Black Hawk Down" incident, but the senior Defense Department official told me that "this was not one of three missions."â€¦. He likened the routine of evening raids to "mowing the lawn."

Why would a person overseeing an operation like this deflate the bubble of adoration? It doesn't seem helpful to the interests of Special Operations and it doesn't seem credible, either. So there's presumably a reason that this person isagain speaking to The New Yorker after this important exclusive has been carefully considered and strategized. We just don't know what it is, and the magazine doesn't even bother to wonder.
*
Most of the other sources seem to play bit roles. One is "a senior adviser to the President" whose only comment is that Obama decided not to trust the Pakistanis with advance notice of the raidwhich we already knew. Another namedsource is Ben Rhodes, a deputy national-security adviser, who does not evince any intimate knowledge of the raid itself.
The New Yorker also includes a few other officials who brief Schmidle on general background, like a "senior defense department official" explaining the overall relationship between Special Operations and CIA personnel, and a named former CIA counsel explaining that the Abottabad raid amounted to "a complete incorporation of JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] into a C.I.A. operation."
That's only slipped into the article, but it is perhaps one of the most important aspects of the piece, along with a brief mention of the way in which former Iraq/Afghan commander General DavidPetraeus has gone to CIA while CIA director Panetta has been made Defense Secretary. (For more on these important but confusing games of high-level musical chairs, which were not deeply scrutinized in the conventional media, see our WhoWhatWhy pieces here [SUP][23][/SUP] and here [SUP][24][/SUP].)
This may sound too technical for your taste, but the takeaway point is that fundamental realignments are afoot in that vast, massively-funded, powerful and secretive part of the US government that is treated by thecorporate press almost as if it does not exist. The tales of internal intrigue that we do not hear would begin to provide us with the real narratives that are not ours to have.
In the New Yorker piece, we do learn lots of things we did not know beforefor example, that Special Ops considered tunneling in or coming in by foot rather than helicopter. We learn that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wanted to drop massive bombs on the house. General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shared that viewCartwright is one of the few who is directly identified as a source for Schmidle. That's important stuff, and worth more than brief mention. And, once again, we need more effort to try and understand why we are being told these things.

Continue to page 4 of 4 [SUP][25][/SUP]
"WE REALLY DIDN'T KNOWâ€¦WHAT WAS GOING ON"
About two-thirds of the article is a sort of scene-setter, a prologue to on-the-ground story we've all been waiting for. But when the big moment arrives, The New Yorker's Schmidle instead punts:

Meanwhile, James, the squadron commander, had breached one wall, crossed a section of the yard covered with trellises, breached a second wall, and joined up with the SEALs from helo one, who were entering the ground floor of the house. What happened next is not precisely clear. "I can tell you that there was a time period of almost twenty to twenty-five minutes where we really didn't know just exactly what was going on," Panetta said later, on "PBS NewsHour."
Until this moment, the operation had been monitored by dozens of defense, intelligence, and Administration officials watching the drone's video feed. The SEALs were not wearing helmet cams, contrary to a widely cited report by CBS. None of them had any previous knowledge of the house's floor plan, and they were further jostled by the awareness that they were possibly minutes away from ending the costliest manhunt in American history; as a result, some of their recollectionson which this account is basedmay be imprecise and, thus, subject to dispute.

Schmidle claims that the SEALs' "recollectionson which this account is based"are subject to dispute. But as I've noted, the article is NOT based on their recollections, but on what some source claims to Schmidle were their recollections. Why the summary may be imprecise and thus subject to dispute after it has been filtered by a person controlling the scenario, must be asked. Perhaps this is why The New Yorker is not permitted to speak directly to the SEALsbecause of what they could tell the magazine.
Now, killing the men who lived in the compound: First, the SEALs shot and killed the courier, who they say was armed, and his wife, who they say was not, when they emerged from the guesthouse. Then they killed the courier's brother inside the main house, who they say was armed. Then they moved up the stairs:

..three SEALs marched up the stairs. Midway up, they saw bin Laden's twenty-three-year-old son, Khalid, craning his neck around the corner. He then appeared at the top of the staircase with an AK-47. Khalid, who wore a white T-shirt with an overstretched neckline and had short hair and a clipped beard, fired down at the Americans. (The counterterrorism official claims that Khalid was unarmed, though still a threat worth taking seriously. "You have an adult male, late at night, in the dark, coming down the stairs at you in an Al Qaeda houseyour assumption is that you're encountering a hostile.") At least two of the SEALs shot back and killed Khalid.

Ok, that's pretty strange. First, Schmidle asserts that Khalid bin Laden was armed and fired with an AK-47. Then he quotes this counterterrorism officialwho could in fact be Brennansaying that Khalid was unarmed. Why does the New Yorker first run the "Khalid was armed" claim as a fact, and then include the official disclaimer? What's really going on here, even from the New Yorker's editorial standpoint?
Here's another such instance: a dispute over where Osama was when they first saw him:

Three SEALs shuttled past Khalid's body and blew open another metal cage, which obstructed the staircase leading to the third floor. Bounding up the unlit stairs, they scanned the railed landing. On the top stair, the lead SEAL swivelled right; with his night-vision goggles, he discerned that a tall, rangy man with a fist-length beard was peeking out from behind a bedroom door, ten feet away. The SEAL instantly sensed that it was Crankshaft [codename for Osama]. (The counterterrorism official asserts that the SEAL first saw bin Laden on the landing, and fired but missed.)

What's the purpose of all this? How good is intelligence work when they can't reconstruct whether the singular focus of the operation was first spotted peeking out from a doorway, or standing on the landing above them?
And then one of the most interesting passages, about the kill:

A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden's chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. "There was never any question of detaining or capturing himit wasn't a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees," the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.)

Uh-oh. So who is this Special Operations officer? He is directly disputing the administration's claim on what surely matters greatlywhat were President Obama's intentions here? And did they always plan to just ignore them? That The New Yorker just drops this in with no further analysis or context is, simply put, shocking.
It seems almost as if Panetta, Obama, and the people in the story who most closely approximate actual representatives of the public in a functioning democracy, were basically cut off from observing what went down that dayor from influencing what transpired.
Consider this statement from Panetta, not included in the New Yorker piece:

"Once those teams went into the compound I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes where we really didn't know just exactly what was going on. And there were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information.
"We had some observation of the approach there, but we did not have direct flow of information as to the actual conduct of the operation itself as they were going through the compound."

Panetta's "lost 25 minutes" needs to be seen in the context of a man with civilian roots, notwithstanding two mid-60s years as a Lt. in military intel: Former Congressman, Clinton White House budget chief and Chief of Staff, credentials with civil rights and environment movementsa fellow with real distance from the true spook/military mojo.
Taken together, here's what we have: President Obama did not know exactly what was going on. He did not decide that bin Laden should be shot. And he did not decide to dump his body in the ocean. The CIA and its Special Ops allies made all the decisions.
Then Brennan, the CIA's man, put out the version that CIA wanted. (Keep in mind that, as noted earlier, CIA was really running the operationwith Special Ops under its direction).
What we're looking at, folks, is the reality of democracy in America: A permanent entrenched covert establishment that marches to its own drummer or to drummers unknown. It's exactly the kind of thing that never gets reported. Too scary. Too real. Better to dismiss this line of inquiry as too "conspiracy theory."
If that sounds like hyperbole, let me add this rather significant consideration. It is the background of Nicholas Schmidle, the freelancer who wrote the New Yorker piece. It may give us insight into how he landed this extraordinary exclusive on this extraordinarily sensitive matterinformation again, significantly, not shared by The New Yorker with its readers:
[SUP][26][/SUP]Schmidle's father is Marine Lt. General Robert E. "Rooster" Schmidle Jr. General Schmidle served as Commanding Officer of Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force (Experimental)that's essentially Special Operations akin to Navy SEALs. In recent years, he was "assistant deputy commandant for Programs and Resources (Programs)"where, among other things, he oversaw "irregular warfare." (See various, including contract specs here [SUP][27][/SUP] on "Special Operations," and picture caption here [SUP][28][/SUP]) In 2010, he moved into another piece of this, when Obama appointed him deputy commander, U.S. Cyber Command. Cumulatively, this makes the author's father a very important man in precisely the sort of circles who care how the raid is publicly portrayedand who would be quite intimate with some of the folks hunkering down with Obama in the Situation Room on the big day.
[SUP][29][/SUP]You can see a photo [SUP][30][/SUP] of Gen. Schmidle on a 2010 panel [SUP][31][/SUP] about "Warring Futures." Event co-sponsors include Slate magazine and the New America Foundation, both of which, according to Nicholas Schmidle's website [SUP][32][/SUP], have also provided Schmidle's son with an ongoing perch (with Slate giving him a platform for numerous articles from war zones and the foundation employing him as a Fellow.) These parallel relationships grow more disturbing with contemplation.
*
So let's get back to the question, Who is driving this Ship of State?
First, consider this passage:

Obama returned to the White House at two o'clock, after playing nine holes of golf at Andrews Air Force Base. The Black Hawks departed from Jalalabad thirty minutes later. Just before four o'clock, Panetta announced to the group in the Situation Room that the helicopters were approaching Abbottabad.

[SUP][33][/SUP]To be really useful reporting here, rather than just meaningless "color", we'd need some context. Was the golf game's purpose to blow off steam at an especially tense time? Did Obama not think it important enough for him to be constantly present in the hours leading up to the raid? Is this typical of his schedule when huge things are happening? We desperately need a more realistic sense of what presidents do, how much they're really in charge, or, instead, figureheads for unnamed individuals who make most of the critical decisions.
Here's something just as strange: we are told the President took a commanding role in determining key operational tactics, but then didn't seem interested in important details, after the fact.

Forty-five minutes after the Black Hawks departed, four MH-47 Chinooks launched from the same runway in Jalalabad. Two of them flew to the border, staying on the Afghan side; the other two proceeded into Pakistan. Deploying four Chinooks was a last-minute decision made after President Barack Obama said he wanted to feel assured that the Americans could "fight their way out of Pakistan."

[SUP][34][/SUP]Now, consider the following climactic New Yorker account of Obama meeting with the squadron commander after it's all over, with bin Laden dead and the troops home and safe. Schmidle decides to call the commander "Jamesâ€¦the names of all the covert operators mentioned in this story have been changed." The anecdote will feature a canine, one who, in true furry dog story fashion, had already been introduced early in the New Yorker piece, as "Cairo" (it's not clear whether the dog's name, too, was changed):

As James talked about the raid, he mentioned Cairo's role. "There was a dog?" Obama interrupted. James nodded and said that Cairo was in an adjoining room, muzzled, at the request of the Secret Service.
"I want to meet that dog," Obama said.
"If you want to meet the dog, Mr. President, I advise you to bring treats," James joked. Obama went over to pet Cairo, but the dog's muzzle was left on.

Here's the ending:

Before the President returned to Washington, he posed for photographs with each team member and spoke with many of them, but he left one thing unsaid. He never asked who fired the kill shot, and the SEALs never volunteered to tell him.

Why did the president not want to ask for specifics on the most important parts of the operationbut seemed so interested in a dog that participated? While it is certainly plausible that this happened, we should be wary of one of the oldest p.r. tricks aroundget people cooing over an animal, while the real action is elsewhere.
Certainly, Obama's reaction differs dramatically from that of other previous presidents who always demanded detailed briefings and would have stayed on top of it all throughoutincluding fellow Democrats JFK, Carter and Clinton. At minimum, it shows a degree of caution or ceremony based upon a desire not to know too muchor an understanding that he may not ask. Does anyone doubt that Bill Clinton would have been on watch 24/7 during this operation, parsing legal, political and operational details throughout, and would have demanded to know who felled America's most wanted?
Summing up about the reliability of this account, which is now likely to become required reading for every student in America, long into the future:
It is based on reporting by a man who fails to disclose that he never spoke to the people who conducted the raid, or that his father has a long background himself running such operations (this even suggests the possibility that Nicholas Schmidle's own father could have been one of those "unnamed sources.")

It seems to have depended heavily on trusting second-hand accounts by people with a poor track record for accurate summations, and an incentive to spin.

The alleged decisions on killing bin Laden and disposing of his body lack credibility.

The DNA evidence that the SEALs actually got their man is questionable.

Though certain members of Congress say they have seen photos of the body (or, to be precise, a body), the rest of us have not seen anything.

Promised photos of the ceremonial dumping of the body at sea have not materialized.

The eyewitnesses from the houseincluding the surviving wiveshave disappeared without comment.

We weren't allowed to hear from the raid participants. And on August 6, seventeen Navy SEALs died when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan. We're told that fifteen of them came, amazingly, from the same SEAL Team 6 that carried out the Abbottabad raidbut that none of the dead were present for the raid. We do get to hear the stories of those men, and their names [SUP][35][/SUP].
Of course, if any of those men had been in the Abbottabad raidor knew anything about it of broad public interest, we'd be none the wiserbecause, the only "reliable sources" still available (and featured by the New Yorker)are military and intelligence professionals, coming out of a long tradition of cover-ups and fabrications.
Meanwhile, we have this president, this one who according to the magazine article didn't ask about the core issueswhy this man was killed, who killed him, under whose orders, what would be done with the body.
Well, he may not want answers. But we ought to want them. Otherwise, it's all just a game.

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Photo Sources: 1 [SUP][36][/SUP],2 [SUP][37][/SUP],3 [SUP][38][/SUP],4 [SUP][39][/SUP],5 [SUP][40][/SUP],6 [SUP][41][/SUP],7 [SUP][42][/SUP],8 [SUP][30][/SUP],9 [SUP][43][/SUP],10 [SUP][44][/SUP],11 [SUP][45][/SUP],12 [SUP][46][/SUP],13 [SUP][47][/SUP],14 [SUP][48][/SUP],15 [SUP][49][/SUP],16 [SUP][50][/SUP],17 [SUP][51][/SUP],18 [SUP][52][/SUP]

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[5] noted: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/...story.html
[6] this: http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/07/27/the-ny-...tting-old/
[7] Family of Secrets: http://www.amazon.com/Family-Secrets-Ame...608190064/
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***Magda Hassan*** · 20-12-2011, 05:42 AM

What The Government Told Gizmodo About Osama Bin Laden's Body

Posted by HAL9000 on December 19, 2011
Amazing read. Sam Biddle writes on Gizmodo:

Months ago, I asked the Pentagon for its visual records of Osama bin Laden's sea burial under the Freedom of Information Act. Today, I received a thick packet of No a complete denial that any records exist. Read it.
The core of the response is this: the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, United States Special Operations Command, and the Department of the Navy all had their records searched. Nothing. Admiral Mike Mullen's email was scanned. Nothing. The Pentagon claims not a single person aboard the USS Carl Vinson, where Bin Laden's remains were disposed of, took a single picture. Not a single email from the ship makes reference to photo or video. Essentially: nobody in the military has evidence. So did these things ever exist? If so, they're in a filing cabinet at the CIA, where they'll be safe for the rest of time.

Copy of documents here

Carsten Wiethoff · 20-12-2011, 08:32 AM

Hahahahaha....

SOMEONE is definitely lying here.
I quote MSNBC from May 2, 2011:

Quote:CAIRO The at-sea burial of Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was videotaped and probably will be publicly released soon, two Pentagon officials said Monday.
The officials said photos of the body before its disposal in the North Arabian Sea on Monday also may be released. The officials spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because decisions on releasing the materials were pending.

I mean, it would not be the first time that "Pentagon officials" are purposely talking bullshit, but on the other hand it would also not be the first time the Pentagon denies having certain documents, which in reality do exist.

I tend to the opinion that SOME records of SOMETHING being dumped into the sea SOMEWHERE certainly were produced and meant to be published, but that it was decided to not give out ANYTHING which could be used as proof of criminal activity in case it turns out to be fabricated evidence. Same with the alleged video of Bin Ladens death, which may or may not exist and may or may not show Bin Laden and may or may not have been filmed on location in Abbotabad. I am certain that any FOIA for this will be returned with either "National Security" or "Does Not Exist", possibly both. [Image: icon6.png]

***Magda Hassan*** · 20-12-2011, 10:00 AM

***Peter Lemkin*** · 20-12-2011, 11:36 AM

What is he dead AGAIN?! :loco:

***Jan Klimkowski*** · 20-12-2011, 08:20 PM

Magda - that video is of some black guy realizing he's gonna get horse whipped, lynched and burnt alive for tossing a KKK Grand Wizard out of his chopper....

There are some things you simply can't do in Amerika.

Ed Jewett · 21-12-2011, 03:39 AM

.. and the North Korean is in a glass casket, the POTUS is looking in his own mirror, and somewhere someone is perfecting something even more sinister than the three of them sharing beverages at a private retreat.

***Magda Hassan*** · 06-01-2012, 09:16 AM

Totally in keeping with the whole OBL legend and theater. Can't wait to see what happens in the next installment after the Riechenbach falls finale.

Quote:CIA leaked bin Laden operation details to Sony

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Published: 06 January, 2012, 01:32

Osama bin Laden (AFP Photo / Site Intelligence Group / HO)

TRENDS: Osama Bin Laden killed SOPA
TAGS: Movies, History, USA, Media, Culture

While the White House went to great lengths to keep the details of last year's raid on the Osama bin Laden compound from penetrating the public peripheral, investigators are questioning how much intel the Pentagon passed to hotshots in Hollywood.
Lawmakers say that the May 2011 event that nearly ended the War on Terror was among the most secretive in the history of the CIA, and the Obama administration has since shunned the public from any details pertaining to the plan even after the former al-Qaeda leader's execution and burial at sea. As skeptics scorned President Obama for his lack of transparency in the process and demanded proof, the White House largely left details of the event and what occurred before and after locked up in Washington.
According to Rep. Peter King (R-NY), insiders in Tinsletown were given the key.
King, who leads the House Homeland Security Committee, has for months questioned the relationship between the Pentagon and Hollywood. Although talks of a bin Laden biopic have allegedly existed since shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have been linked to an upcoming film that will dramatically reenact the May raid on the silver screen since as early as August of this year.
Bigelow and Boal previously teamed up for the 2008 release The Hurt Locker, a film which revealed tales of the United States' recent involvements in Iraq.
A link between Washington and Hollywood has long been existent, but King fears that the two being in cahoots can this time cause a great gaffe in terms of how the American intelligence community handles information.
The US has already gone after Pakistani officials whom are believed to have divulged details of the raid. In Pakistan, those working with American authorities without state-given permission have been on trial for sentences that carry the death penalty.
In August, King told the inspectors general of the Pentagon and the CIA that Sony and Bigelow had been given "top-level access to the most classified mission in history."
The "alleged collaboration belies a desire for transparency in favor of a cinematographic view of history," King wrote at the time.
"Filmmakers, if they want to make a film about the war, any war, and they want to use military technology, they have to have the support of the Pentagon," war correspondent Keith Harmon Snow told RT. "Scripts go to Pentagon, the Pentagon reviews the scripts and approves or rejects any collaborations. Directors know exactly what they're doing. They get their funding and their weaponry from the Pentagon, it's a very close relationship."
That relationship between the two, said Snow, has been made clear in not just films like The Hurt Locker, but in flicks ranging from King Kong to Rambo.

America at large, on the other hand, continues to be left out of the equation of the relationship between Washington and Hollywood. The results could be much more damaging than increasing a sense of alienation for the American people against their own government, however. According to the letter King penned to the Pentagon in August, the film in the works "is bound to increase such leaks, and undermine these organizations' hard-won reputations as `quiet professionals.'"
Now months after King cautioned authorities, an official investigation will begin to probe any connection between the two coasts that would be considered improper. King says that the Pentagon's inspector general sent him a letter last month that revealed that the DoD will now investigate any "actions taken by Defense Department personnel related to the release of information to the filmmakers."
In November, King said the CIA would be looking to develop "single point of reference that will govern future interactions with the entertainment industry," although such move might come as too little too soon after the two entities have long established a relationship that has pumped money into the war machine while perpetuating propaganda to moviegoers across the country.
Following King's initial attack on the link between Hollywood and the DoD, White House spokesman Jay Carney said such allegations were "ridiculous" and "simply false," a response which the lawmaker called "shockingly dismissive."
The connection between the DoD and Hollywood is one that runs deep, but is also one marred by some serious contradictions. While the entertainment industry is going to great lengths to insure that their films are made possible by working hand-in-hand with the Pentagon on script approval and props, the end result in this case will be the glorification of one of America's biggest secrets for the entire globe to see on the big screen.
Meanwhile, Sony, who has largely invested in the bin Laden film, has spent immense amounts of money on lobbying on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and The PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011) to make sure that their products are protected on the Internet. It would seem as if Sony is largely spending to preserve their own intellectual property and keep their contributions to American society free from infringement, yet are more than willing to profit off of a massive intelligence community leak.
Sony had recently been labeled as an adamant supporter of SOPA, a controversial legislation still on Capitol Hill that will largely obstruct the Internet under the guise of protecting copyrighted material. The bill, which came under criticism along with the recent passing of the National Defense Authorization Act that could lead to the indefinite detention of American citizens, have been gauged as critics as attempts to increase a police state in America.
Sony has lobbied in favor of the act, which would largely impact the World Wide Web as a whole, limiting what can be published online and increasing penalties for allegedly guilty parties. After hacktivists with the group Anonymous proposed a cyberwar on the entertainment giant, Sony Computer Entertainment withdrew support of SOPA. Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Sony Music Entertainment and Sony Music Nashville are all still listed as supporters however, and the Entertainment Software Association, of which SEC is a member, is still adamantly for the passing of SOPA.
Additionally, Sony had lobbied in favor of the PROTECT IP Act, specifically spending funds on persuading congress to strongly enforce culprits believed of online copyright infringement. https://rt.com/usa/news/sony-osama-king-hollywood-269/

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