LOS ANGELES TIMES’ THE FRAMEWORK – BIN LADEN PICS
Kyaemon
http://framework.latimes.com/2011/05/01/osama-bin-laden-photos/#/4
Hit “show captions” button at bottom of picture. Then hit “next” button on the right, at the middle of each picture.
52 clear pictures tell a story.
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Full coverage: U.S. kills Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden dead – latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-osamadead-html,0,3794670.htmlstory
“Justice has been done,” President Obama tells the nation in his address announcing that U.S. special forces have killed the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks.
• Bin Laden was unarmed when killed, White House says
• White House holds off on releasing death photos
• Bin Laden’s killing reignites war strategy debate
• Palin credits Bush, ignores Obama
• U.S. turns attention to Pakistan
• Tweets by NFL’s Rashard Mendenhall cause stir
Click the various topic titles (above) to obtain a full coverage with photos.
28 comments
Kyaemon
May 4, 2011 at 8:26 pm
Massive Intelligence Haul: U.S. Spies Comb Trove of Computer Files Nabbed in bin Laden Raid for Terror Clues.
http://tunnelwall.blogspot.com/2011/05/massive-intelligence-haul-us-spies-comb.html
WSJ “Putting into action a specially designed Sensitive-Site Exploitation plan, the Navy Seals who conducted the raid carried off five computers, 10 hard drives and more than 100 storage devices, such as DVDs and removable flash drives, U.S. officials said.
“The intelligence find is a jolt to bin Laden’s network that could force its terror operatives to move into areas or initiate communications that make them more easily detectable.”
OBL not armed “The legal justifications for shooting bin laden dead come partly from the rules under which the Seals were operating. They were under the authority of the Central Intelligence Agency, which operates under fewer restrictions than the military, which has rules governing when troops can use deadly force. Even under the military’s rules, the killing was legally justified as long as bin Laden wasn’t attempting to surrender.
“Scott Silliman, an expert on national security law at Duke Law School, said there was no question the shooting was legally justified. ”
QUOTE:
The words of Abraham Lincoln
“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined…could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
Kyaemon
May 5, 2011 at 11:48 pm
Intense interest surrounds dog who may have participated in bin Laden raid
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110505/ts_yblog_thelookout/intense-interest-surrounds-dog-who-helped-capture-bin-laden
Americans are fascinated by the anonymous U.S. Navy SEALs who daringly raided Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan compound this week, but one canine commando is attracting especially fervent interest.
According to the New York Times and the British tabloid The Sun, a military dog (not pictured) was strapped onto one of the assault team members as he was lowered out of a Black Hawk helicopter and began the operation that killed the notorious terrorist on Monday. But who is this canine hero?
Sadly, we know very little, and the Pentagon hasn’t confirmed that a dog was even on the mission, much less release information about the canine’s name or breed.
“Little is known about what may be the nation’s most courageous dog,” the Times’ Gardner Harris writes. He speculates that the dog was most likely a German shepherd or a Belgian Malinois, since those are the breeds most often found in the military’s 2,700-strong military dog program. (A new breed, however, is becoming popular with the troops. Labrador retrievers have begun to “wander off-leash 100 yards or more in front of patrols to ensure the safety of the route.”)
The Pentagon and White House are keeping tight-lipped about the details of the operation, but that, of course, hasn’t prevented commentators from speculating on the dog’s role based on the functions of other war dogs in combat. “It’s possible that the commandos brought a specialized search dog, which would have been sent in ahead of the humans to find explosives or people hidden inside the building,” Slate’s Brian Palmer writes. Or the dog could have been a “combat tracker”–canines who are specially trained to sniff out individuals and then follow their trail. Saddam Hussein was found in a hole under a hut–the assault team could have decided that they needed a good tracking dog in case bin Laden had a similar idea.
Dogs are increasingly important in America’s combat operations abroad, and some have been outfitted with special (and adorable) “doggles” to protect their eyes, oxygen masks to protect their lungs as they parachute out with soldiers at high altitudes, and even waterproof vests that contain infrared cameras that transmit video back to servicemen watching a monitor yards behind them. Check out Foreign Policy’s beautiful photo essay on military dogs here.
Luckily for this courageous and anonymous furry creature, there is some precedent for war dogs receiving military honors. The Navy awarded a Silver Star in 2009 to a dog named Remco who gave his life charging “an insurgent’s hide-out in Afghanistan,” Harris writes. According to Foreign Policy, another dog named Eli fiercely guarded his Marine, Private First Class Carlton Rusk, after he was shot by Taliban sniper fire in Afghanistan. Rusk’s bomb-sniffing dog would not even let fellow Marines approach the wounded Rusk, who did not survive the attack. Eli now lives with Rusk’s family.
The dog’s role was not mentioned in any of the public White House press briefings on bin Laden’s death. Pentagon spokeswoman Elizabeth Robbins wrote in an e-mail to The Lookout in response to our question about the dog that the Pentagon has “no additional operational details, or comments on operational details, to make at this time.”
zoe
May 6, 2011 at 5:05 am
Dogs are men best friend…. 🙂
Kyaemon
May 6, 2011 at 9:10 am
Pakistani foreign office defends intelligence body
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2011-05/05/c_13860702.htm
ISLAMABAD, May 5 (Xinhua) — Foreign Secretary of Pakistan Thursday said that Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) has the potential to combat terrorism and insisted that ISI is mindful of its international obligations.
Holding a press conference in capital city Islamabad, Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir denied the comment of CIA chief Leon Panetta that ISI had been either “involved or incompetent” regarding Osama bin Laden issue.
He said that ISI has a brilliant record in serving the country and fighting terrorism so it should not be criticized on a single argument regarding Osama bin Laden.
“To infer that the ISI provided cover for Osama bin Laden is absolutely wrong,” he said.
The foreign secretary also reiterated that Pakistan was not consulted by the United States over the Abbottabad assault that led to the killing of al-Qaida’s chief.
He also took on India for recent remarks that if needed they would carry out an operation similar to the one that killed Osama to nab those wanted for Mumbai attack in 2008. He warned that any country that again seeks to raid Pakistan’s territory would face consequences from Pakistan’s military.
“We feel that that sort of misadventure or miscalculation would result in a terrible catastrophe,” he said. “There should be no doubt Pakistan has adequate capacity to ensure its own defense.”
He said that the first and the foremost issue for the government is to protect the sovereignty of Pakistan. Expressing his unhappiness, he said that it was not the first time that the issue of sovereignty has come up and reminded other countries to respect Pakistan’s rights.
The foreign secretary said Pakistan’s relation with the United States would not be affected after the covert operation taken up by the United States to eliminate Osama bin Laden, adding that Pakistan would remain committed as a nation to purge the region from terrorism.
Kyaemon
May 6, 2011 at 5:58 pm
Osama Bin Laden: The long hunt for the al-Qaeda leader
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13261879
he United States sought to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden for more than 15 years before tracking him down to a compound in north-western Pakistan, not far from a large town and the country’s military academy.
Although no opportunities presented themselves in recent years, there were several before 2002 – prompting many to question the power and effectiveness of the US military and intelligence machine.
US senators have said the failure to find Bin Laden forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism, left the American people more vulnerable, laid the foundation for the Afghan insurgency, and inflamed the internal strife in Pakistan.
Missile strikes
In 1996 the CIA’s Counter-terrorist Centre (CTC) set up “Bin Laden Issue Station”, a special unit of a dozen officers, to analyse intelligence on and plan operations against the Saudi millionaire. At the time Bin Laden was believed to be financing militants in the Middle East and Africa.
By late 1997 – after Bin Laden had been forced to move from Sudan to Afghanistan, and had called on Muslims to “launch a guerrilla war against American forces” – the unit had formulated plans for Afghan tribesmen to capture him before handing him over to the US.
Though the head of the CTC thought it was the “perfect operation”, the director of the CIA decided not to go ahead with it, according to a later report issued by the 9/11 Commission’s report.
Then, in August 1998, more than 220 people were killed when lorries filled with bombs drove into the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. After determining that al-Qaeda was responsible, US President Bill Clinton authorised missile strikes against militant camps in Afghanistan, including Bin Laden’s compound.
The strikes failed to kill any al-Qaeda leaders and prompted Bin Laden to start changing locations frequently and unpredictably, and to add new bodyguards. He also changed his means of communication. Nevertheless, tribal sources were still able to provide regular updates on where he was.
In December 1998 it was reported that Bin Laden might be staying the night at the residence of the governor of Kandahar. But a missile strike was ruled out after generals predicted 200 people might be killed or injured. Some lower-level CIA figures worried that the US might rue the decision.
A similar opportunity to bomb a camp south of Kandahar in February 1999 was missed because Bin Laden moved on before the operation was approved.
Perhaps the best opportunity to target Bin Laden came in May 1999, when CIA assets confidently reported Bin Laden’s location for five days and nights in and around Kandahar. Despite officials at the Pentagon and CIA expressing little doubt about the operation’s success, it was not authorised.
From then until after the 11 September 2001 attacks the US government did not again actively consider a missile strike against Bin Laden. Putting US personnel on the ground was also ruled out because of the risk of failure.
Michael Scheuer, who founded the Bin Laden unit and ran it until 1999, told the BBC: “Mr Clinton is more a citizen of the world, and he was worried about what the Muslim world would think if we missed and killed a civilian.”
“He generally talked a good game that he did his best once he left office. But I happened to be there at the time, and Bin Laden should have been an annoying memory by the middle of 1998 or early 1999.”
Tora Bora
On 18 September 2001, US President George W Bush famously declared that Bin Laden was wanted “dead or alive”.
Smoke rises from the Tora Bora mountains after a US air strike (15 December 2001) Bin Laden fully expected to die in the mountains of Tora Bora
The next month US aircraft began a massive bombing campaign against al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan as part of a mission to destroy the group, kill Bin Laden and other key leaders, and to defeat the Taliban.
Military special forces and CIA teams, along with their Afghan allies, were also deployed on the ground to seize control of al-Qaeda strongholds.
Although the US and its allies declared victory that December, Bin Laden had been neither captured nor killed. He was, however, cornered in a complex of caves and tunnels in the mountainous eastern Afghan area of Tora Bora.
Under relentless attack from the ground and air, Bin Laden fully expected to die and even wrote a will on 14 December.
But fewer than 100 US commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected, according to a 2009 report by the US Senate foreign relations committee.
Requests were also turned down for US troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few kilometres away in Pakistan.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
A couple of times we thought we actually got him, but we didn’t”
End Quote Andrew Card Chief-of-staff to President George W Bush
Instead, commanders chose to rely on air strikes and Afghan militias to attack Bin Laden and on Pakistan’s Frontier Corps to seal his escape routes.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at the time that he was concerned that too many US troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency.
Two days after writing his will, Bin Laden and his bodyguards walked out of Tora Bora and disappeared over the border into Pakistan.
“Removing the al-Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat,” the Senate committee report concluded.
“But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed Bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide.”
Video tapes
After Tora Bora, the hunt moved to Pakistan. Several senior al-Qaeda leaders were arrested or killed, including the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but there were very few leads of Bin Laden himself.
Pakistan’s government dismissed reports that he was in the country, but it was widely believed that he was moving from village to village in the north-western region of Waziristan with a small group of bodyguards, where he would live under the protection of Pashtun tribal leaders. ………..
Kyaemon
May 6, 2011 at 6:10 pm
Al-Qaida confirms Osama bin Laden’s death
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2011-05/06/c_13862668.htm
ISLAMABAD, May 6 (Xinhua) — Al-Qaida, a notorious terrorist group, has confirmed its leader Osama bin Laden’s death, reported local English TV channel Express on Friday afternoon.
The report said that al-Qaida confirmed its leader bin Laden’s death in a statement posted on a Jihadist internet forum. However, the report failed to mention when this statement was issued and when and how bin Laden died.
Despite the announcement by the United States about the killing of Osama bin Laden in a compound in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Abbottabad in an early Monday morning’s military operation conducted by the U.S. special task force, doubts about the death of the world’s most wanted terrorist still exist among many people as the U.S. side has refused to release the pictures of the body of Osama bin Laden.
The fact that the U.S. side hurriedly buried the dead body of Osama bin Laden at sea as it claimed is also a factor contributing to the doubt about the death of bin Laden.
Many people in Pakistan believe that the killing of Osama bin Laden is a propaganda and there were local media reports saying that Osama bin Laden was killed long time ago.
Kyaemon
May 7, 2011 at 6:10 am
Source: Bin Laden Directed al-Qaeda Figures
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2070242,00.html
(WASHINGTON) — The wealth of information pulled from Osama bin Laden’s compound has reinforced the belief that he played a strong role in planning and directing attacks by al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Yemen and Somalia, senior U.S. officials said Friday.
And the data further demonstrates to the U.S. that top al-Qaeda commanders and other key insurgents are scattered throughout Pakistan, not just in the rugged border areas, and are being supported and given sanctuary by Pakistanis, a senior defense official said.
(See pictures of Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan hideout.)
U.S. counterterrorism officials have debated how big a role bin Laden and core al-Qaeda leaders were playing in the attacks launched by affiliated terror groups, particularly al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is based in Yemen, and al-Shabab in Somalia.
Information gathered in the compound, officials said, strengthened beliefs that bin Laden was a lot more involved in directing al-Qaeda personnel and operations than sometimes thought over the last decade. And it suggests bin Laden was “giving strategic direction” to al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen, the defense official said.
(See pictures of people celebrating Osama bin Laden’s death.)
Bin Laden’s first priority, the official said, was his own security. But the data shows that he was far more active in providing guidance and telling affiliated groups in Yemen and Somalia what they should or should not be doing. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive material.
Their comments underscore U.S. resolve to pursue terror leaders in Pakistan, particularly during this critical period in the Afghanistan war, as President Barack Obama moves to fulfill his promise to begin withdrawing troops this July.
Already the Afghan Taliban has warned that bin Laden’s death will only boost morale of insurgents battling the U.S. and its NATO allies. Al-Qaeda itself vowed revenge, confirming bin Laden’s death for the first time but saying that Americans’ “happiness will turn to sadness.”
For its part, the U.S. has already launched at least one drone strike into Pakistan in the days since bin Laden was killed, and there is no suggestion those will be curtailed at all. The strikes are largely carried out by CIA drones, and the expectation is that they will continue in the coming days as U.S. military and intelligence officials try to take quick advantage of the data they swept up in the raid before insurgents have a chance to change plans or locations.
(See Osama bin Laden’s obituary.)
The American public, meanwhile, will get a peek at bin Laden’s life inside the secret compound in Abbottabad on Saturday, according to U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the data has not yet been released.
New, unreleased bin Laden propaganda tapes as well as footage of him moving about the compound are expected to be made public, officials said. Still cloaked in secrecy, however, are photographs of the dead terror leader, who was shot once in the head and once in the chest by the Navy SEAL team that swept into the compound in the dark, early morning hours Monday local time.
Officials say they have already learned a lot from bin Laden’s cache of computers and data, but they would not confirm reports that it yielded clues to the whereabouts of al-Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahri. Al-Zawahri is a leading candidate to take bin Laden’s place as the leader of the terror group. Officials say the handwritten notes and computer material are being scoured for intelligence that could help track down new targets.
See TIME’s complete archive of Osama bin Laden coverage.
Kyaemon
May 7, 2011 at 6:54 pm
Kicking around in South Waziristan
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/ME06Df02.html
This is the conclusion of a two-part report.
Part 1: Taliban and al-Qaeda: Friends in arms
WANA, South Waziristan – This Pakistan tribal area on the border with Afghanistan is a stronghold for insurgents fighting Western coalition forces stationed in Afghanistan, but unlike other tribal areas it is peaceful, humane and without the Taliban’s distinctive “pro-Taliban siege mentality”.
The kingpin here is commander Nazir Ahmed (see Part 1), leader of the dominant Wazir tribe, viewed by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces as their “worst enemy”. He is behind all the devastating attacks on NATO forces in Afghanistan’s Paktika province and is the most successful recruiter of footsoldiers for the Taliban in Zabul and Helmand provinces.
Asia Times Online spent a week in South Waziristan, from the main city Wana to the border town of Angorada, to get an overview of how Pakistan created a divide between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and how al-Qaeda eventually outmaneuvered the state.
Al-Qaeda’s first home in the tribal region
After the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was driven out by United States forces in late 2001, al-Qaeda needed to find a new home from where it could regroup as well as bolster the Taliban’s efforts to return to power.
Al-Qaeda homed in on South Waziristan, and by mid-2002 senior members had set up a process that by 2006 had helped the Taliban become a force to be reckoned with in Afghanistan.
The main component of al-Qaeda’s strategy to acquire control of the area was developing a pro-Taliban siege mentality. It invested in the Ahmedzai Wazir tribes in the border regions of Afghanistan and raised them as an unchallenged force in the region (see the Asia Times Online series Waziristan, July 2004.
Within a few years, with the support of their al-Qaeda and Uzbek mentors, these Taliban youths had become so powerful that Pakistan didn’t have the capacity to take them on militarily. So a political solution – divide and rule – was sought.
While the Pakistan army opposed all foreign forces and their backers in the area, Mullah Nazir was given tacit support. The experiment was successful as Nazir led a massacre of 250 al-Qaeda-affiliated anti-Pakistan militants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in 2007 and forced hundreds of others to flee from Wana.
In 2009, Nazir’s Taliban allowed space for the Pakistan army to carry out operations against the anti-Pakistan army Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (Pakistan Taliban -TTP).
From 2007 to 2011, large swathes of South Waziristan were effectively sublet to the Taliban led by Nazir, whom Islamabad believed would guarantee any future deals for peace and reconciliation with the Taliban and force out al-Qaeda.
State within a state
After passing through at least a dozen army checkpoints to enter South Waziristan, I arrived at Wana bazaar, where there was a feeling of peace, unlike neighboring North Waziristan where any stranger feels danger all around. The checkpoints do not generally allow in non-Wazirs, including Mehsud tribesmen as they are considered supporters of the TTP…..
“Not only am I supportive of women’s education, I want each one of my students to open up schools in their villages,” said Haqqani, who showed me around his seminary, computer laboratory and a modern library. The doctor, in his late 40s, seems ready to take more progressive steps, but because of social taboos he will not take any radical measures – only small steps to guarantee success.
Haqqani is the son of a former Pakistani parliamentarian and cleric, Maulana Noor Muhammad, who was killed by al-Qaeda in a suicide attack last year as he was considered a supportive force of the status quo, that is, the military establishment.
“My father was a symbol of stability in South Waziristan. In his presence, nobody could easily disturb the peace of the area. Therefore, he was assassinated,” Haqqani said with sadness.
Muhammad’s killing was a major turning point in South Waziristan and within a matter of a few months the whole “crisis management” arrangement between the Taliban and the Pakistan army was challenged and al-Qaeda is once again gaining strength. It’s aim is to break this region’s stability and transform moderate Taliban into high-grade radical global jihadis. It has already made much progress.
(Note: This report was written before the death of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on May 2.)
Kyaemon
May 8, 2011 at 6:14 pm
YouTube – Osama Bin Laden dead- body identified
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2ZEbfwfxKs
The founder and spiritual figurehead for al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, is dead. Mark Phillips reports.
1,272,452
Kyaemon
May 9, 2011 at 3:33 am
Bin Laden Was Involved in Strategic Operations, U.S. Says
Bin Laden Was Involved in Strategic Operations, U.S. Says – WSJ.com
The raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound yielded a trove of intelligence the size of a small college library, a top White House official said Sunday
In a series of coordinated news-show appearances National Security Adviser Tom Donilon said information seized during last week’s killing of the Al Qaeda leader represents the largest cache ever obtained from a terrorist. He said it indicates that in addition to being the group’s symbolic leader, bin Laden was involved in strategic operations, including Al Qaeda’s propaganda effort.
“I think at this point we can’t declare Al Qaeda strategically defeated,” Mr. Donilon said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Mr. Donilon said he hadn’t seen evidence that Pakistani political, military or intelligence leadership was aware bin Laden was living in Abbottabad, an affluent Pakistani suburb. But the fact that he was residing in a town 35 miles from Islamabad, home to an important military school, “needs to be investigated,” Mr. Donilon said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“We have differences with the Pakistanis, no doubt about it,” Mr. Donilon said on CNN. He also said the country has been an important partner and the U.S. will seek more information from it on Al Qaeda. The U.S. has asked Pakistan for access to three of bin Laden’s wives from the compound, who are in Pakistani custody.
On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Sen. John Kerry, echoing a view widely expressed by members of Congress, said “somebody or some group” in Pakistan must have provided assistance to bin Laden. It’s “extraordinary to believe he could have survived without” a “support system.”
Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. Husain Haqqani said on ABC that “if we had known we would have taken action.” He said no one in the political, military or intelligence ranks knew of bin Laden’s whereabouts, but he also didn’t deny there may have been some in the country who provided assistance.
With bin Laden dead, the U.S. now considers its no. 1 terrorist target Ayman al-Zawahiri, a physician and the founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Mr. Donilon said. He wouldn’t say whether the U.S. now is closer to tracking him down.
Some former members of the Bush administration have made the case that their controversial interrogation and detention tactics helped provide evidence that led to bin Laden’s discovery. Mr. Donilon, responding to a question on the matter, said “no single piece of intelligence led to this” during his NBC appearance.
Mr. Donilon also downplayed early inaccuracies in the account of the Navy SEAL raid released by the Obama administration. Officials originally said he was armed but later retracted that. Mr. Donilon said it isn’t uncommon for “refinements” in the accounts of military operations.
“The messages that have come back to us from around the world—and I study this very closely—is that this was a just action,” Mr. Donilon said on CNN.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that killing bin Laden has the effect of angering U.S. enemies. “Short term, I think it presents some very substantial risks,” he said on NBC, praising both presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush for eliminating the leader of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
On Saturday, the U.S. government released five video clips of bin Laden that were seized by Navy SEALs during the raid on his compound, providing the first photographic evidence of what officials described as the al Qaeda leader’s “active command-and-control center” in Pakistan…..
Kyaemon
May 9, 2011 at 3:51 am
Osama’s wives, children still in Pakistan’s custody
ISLAMABAD, May 8 (Xinhua) –Pakistani Foreign Ministry said on Sunday that government officials were still interrogating wives and children of Osama bin Laden and no country had sought their extradition so far, according to a website report of a local English newspaper The Nation.
Pakistan gained custody of bin Laden’s Yemeni wife, Amal Ahmed Abdullfattah and others family members on Monday after a U.S. operation killed the al-Qaida chief in Abbottabad, a small mountainous town some 100 km north of Pakistan’s capital Islamabad.
The report quoted Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tahmina Janjua as saying that neither Yemen nor any other country had asked for the extradition of bin Laden’s relatives.
The report quoted unidentified Pakistani officials as saying that the wives and children of bin Laden captured in Pakistan would be returned to their countries of origin.
Another local media reported that three wives and eight children of Osama bin Laden are now in the custody of the Pakistani side. Details about them are not available.
Kyaemon
May 11, 2011 at 6:46 pm
US, China brought closer still
By Jingdong Yuan
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/ME11Ad01.html
SYDNEY – The killing of Osama bin Laden has closed a crucial chapter in the decades-long fight against global terrorism, but it is far from closing the book. As many analysts have pointed out, the global “war on terror” has entered the post-Bin Laden era, one that filled with equally, if not more, grim challenges.
Among the key questions raised so far include: How will al-Qaeda re-group and who will likely be the successor to Bin Laden? What does the May 1 raid on the Abbottabad compound say about Pakistan’s role and the future of its ties with the United States? Will the success of the operation renew the debate on the anti-terrorism methods, including the overall US AfPak strategy?
Another important question that has yet to be asked is how the death of the al-Qaeda founder affects US-China cooperation on
anti-terrorism. The answer to this question has important implications, not only for Sino-US relations but also for the geopolitics of South and Central Asia, and the Persian Gulf.
United States-China anti-terrorism cooperation has been relatively solid since September 11, 2001. The Chinese government immediately offered its condolence and support to the George W Bush administration in the wake of the terrorist attacks on America and the two countries have since established various channels of communication and mechanisms to coordinate their counter-terrorism efforts.
Bilateral cooperation has included intelligence-sharing, the posting of Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in China, and US exports of sensitive technologies and equipment to assist China in preventing potential terrorist sabotages prior to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
In September 2002, the Bush administration formally designated the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which seeks independence of Xinjiang from China, as a terrorist organization, which was subsequently classified as such through the United Nations Security Council resolutions sponsored by the United States and China.
Both China and the United States have benefited from this sustained cooperation. For Beijing, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent shift of US strategic priorities dissipated, if not completely dispelled, storms in Sino-US relations.
During the 2000 US presidential campaigns and immediately after the Bush administration took office, China was clearly identified as a strategic competitor, against which Washington had been aligning and strengthening its alliances in East Asia.
And then there was the crisis touched off by the mid-air collision of a US EP-3 spy aircraft and the subsequent detaining of US crew members by the Chinese. The Bush administration approved the largest arms sales to Taiwan in over a decade and Bush himself vowed to defend Taiwan “whatever it takes”. The two powers were on a collision course.
The terrorist attacks and the need to enlist major power cooperation on the “war on terror” provided the opportunity for Beijing and Washington to set aside their differences and focus the new realities in international geopolitics. China had as much reasons to be concerned with terrorism, with home-grown ethnic separatist groups in Xinjiang increasingly resorting to terrorist tactics. At the same time, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia became the havens for these elements that could launch terrorist attacks against Chinese interests at home and abroad.
Beijing was especially concerned over the stability of Pakistan in the post-9/11 world as Washington moved closer to New Delhi. The Chinese government counseled – and Washington apparently listened – that the effectiveness of the “war on terror” must include the collaboration and support of Islamabad. An unstable Pakistan would seriously undermine global efforts in combating terrorism.
China also took the opportunity and played an active role in the establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that includes Russia and three Central Asian republics in their joint fight against the “three evils” – international terrorism, ethnic separatism and religious extremism.
As much as they have cooperated in anti-terrorism efforts, Beijing and Washington have also displayed serious differences over the designation of terrorist groups, approaches to combating terrorism, and priorities in resource commitments in the war on terrorism.
While Beijing has designated a number of groups as terrorist organizations, including the ETIM, Washington has a narrower definition and considers many of these as harboring no more than greater ethnic autonomy, and has criticized China over their mistreatment.
United States approaches to conducting the “war on terror” put more emphasis on the military aspects of physically eliminating terrorist groups or at the minimum dealing serious blows to their operations, to the extent that some of these harsher methods seriously alienated important stakeholders (most notably some of the Islamic countries) in the global campaign against terrorism.
The Chinese government, on the other hand, stresses the importance of dealing with both the causes and symptoms of terrorism and therefore favors more cautious policies.
Washington has urged Beijing to be more involved in the AfPak strategy, but with only limited success. While the Chinese government has demonstrated its willingness to provide financial assistance in re-building Afghanistan, it has confined its activities to some of reconstructing efforts and investments in energy and infrastructure projects.
Indeed, Western analysts have pointed out that Beijing has been able to get the windfall of profitable contracts from Kabul without the loss of “blood and treasure” inflicted on US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces.
Instead, Beijing has invested in the establishment and strengthening of the SCO in its counter-terrorism efforts and has used the platform both to demonstrate its leadership in multilateral institutions and expand its influence into a region of increasing importance to China’s security interests, include as a source of energy supplies. Indeed, this later development has raised questions in Washington whether Beijing’s efforts are aimed at excluding US influence from the Eurasian landmass.
Both Washington and Beijing understand that the demise of Bin Laden by no means spells the end of al-Qaeda and other forms of terrorism. If anything, the “war on terror” will be a drawn-out one that requires continued cooperation between the two countries and the international community as a whole.
For the United States, there is the need to brace for revenge and retaliation from Bin Laden’s followers. For China, its ever expanding presence in global affairs exposes its companies and citizens to potential terrorist actions as a general expression of deprivation and grievances.
China and the United States have every reason for continuing and even strengthening cooperation but they have to manage two potential fallouts in the aftermath of the Bin Laden killing.
One is the impact of a deteriorating relationship and deep distrust between Washington and Islamabad on Sino-Pakistan ties. Clearly, the resentment stoked in Pakistan opens up the opportunity for Beijing to further cement the all-weather relationship between two of Asia’s long-standing friends. Will America’s loss be a gain for China and will Beijing take the advantage of the situation and regain its influence in Pakistan?
The other fallout is whether the Bin Laden raid will usher in the beginning of a drawdown and eventual withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan to refocus on China. Many Western strategic analysts have lamented the fact that the Afghan and Iraqi quagmires have distracted Washington materially and strategically, with the result that China has made critical strategic gains elsewhere.
However, Beijing and Washington would be short-sighted if they formulated their policies based on these zero-sum analyses of developments on the ground. The two countries have much to gain to continue the fruitful cooperation of the past decade and make sound decisions during this critical juncture of the “war on terror”.
Dr Jingdong Yuan is an associate professor at the Center for International Security Studies, University of Sydney.
Kyaemon
May 11, 2011 at 8:40 pm
The Real Housewife of Abbottabad: What bin Laden’s Spouse Knows
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2069934,00.html
The U.S. Navy Seal team that killed Osama bin Laden and removed a bonanza of documents and flash drives may have left behind a vital source of intelligence: bin Laden’s wife Amal Ahmed Abdul Fatah. The story of how she found her way back to bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan from Yemen could well have revealed crucial clues as to whether Pakistani authorities had been aware of the al-Qaeda leader’s presence in their country. And if U.S. officials had been tracking her at the time, they might have found bin Laden sooner.
The White House says that Amal, 24, was shot in the calf when she charged at the Seals who burst into bin Laden’s bedroom, presumably to protect her husband. Bin Laden’s body was taken away for burial in the Arabian Sea. But Amal was left behind, along with her young daughter Safiyah, who Pakistani officials say witnessed her father’s killing. It is not clear how many of the dozen other children in the compound were bin Laden’s. Pakistani officials say bin Laden’s wife and daughter are now recovering in a military hospital in Rawalpindi, and they have released Amal’s passport photograph. (See pictures of Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan hideout.)
The photo shows a pale young woman with generous lips. In accordance with Islamic convention, her face is framed by a headscarf and she is wearing no lipstick or makeup. Later Pakistani press reports suggested that bin Laden may have had several other wives staying with him, but his original spouses are believed to be in Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran, possibly under house arrest.
In 2002, Amal reportedly gave an interview to a Saudi woman’s magazine, Al Majalla, in which she explained how, after the 9/11 attacks, she made her way out of Afghanistan back to Yemen with assistance from Pakistani officials.
Bin Laden’s widow told her Saudi interviewer at the time, “When the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan started, we moved to a mountainous area with some children and lived in one of the caves for two months until one of his sons came with a group of tribesmen and took us with them. I did not know that we were going to Pakistan until they handed us over to the Pakistani government.”
Parts of that account were confirmed to TIME in a telephone interview with an Arab woman who prefers not to be identified but who knew bin Laden personally in Afghanistan and whose family formed part of al-Qaeda’s inner circle. After 9/11, al-Qaeda’s leadership decided to evacuate their families. “All the families had to leave Afghanistan swiftly,” the Arab woman said. “They didn’t want their women and children captured.” However, one of bin Laden’s former aides in Yemen insists that Amal never reached home. (See a photo album of the bin Laden family.)
After bin Laden’s young bride — Amal was then 19 — was turned over to the Pakistani authorities, she and her daughter Safiyah were released and allowed to fly home to Ibb, a town not far from Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, where her father worked as a minor civil servant.
But bin Laden somehow arranged for Amal to rejoin him and his kids in Pakistan. In her magazine interview, she was asked if she would return to her fugitive husband. Her enigmatic reply: “Let us see what happens.” Pakistani press quoted officials as saying that Amal claimed to have been living with bin Laden in the Abbottabad safe house for five years. (See photos of Navy Seals in action.)
With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that U.S. counterterrorism experts spent years trying to decipher the name and the whereabouts of bin Laden’s elusive courier, when keeping tabs on his comely young wife might have led them to him sooner.
Then there’s the question of whether Pakistani authorities had been aware that bin Laden’s wife had returned to their country. Robert Grenier, a former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and a security expert, says it’s not impossible to imagine that the Pakistanis could have let Amal leave the country and failed to detect her return. “The Pakistanis would want to get her back home,” Grenier tells TIME. “There are cultural taboos that come up with women. They certainly wouldn’t facilitate her interrogation by foreigners.” (See pictures of the battle against the Taliban.)
So far, Pakistan is refusing to let U.S. officials anywhere near Amal, now under guard in a hospital. Chances are, that won’t change — cultural taboos aside, she may know too many uncomfortable truths. Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Kayani said Thursday, May 5, that Pakistan is ordering all but the “minimum essential” American personnel to leave the country, a sign that the tense relations between Pakistan and the U.S. have worsened as a result of the Abbottabad raid.
Pakistan’s security establishment has long been accused of playing a double game: taking billions in U.S. aid while secretly backing select jihadi militants in Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s tribal region. Even al-Qaeda types were expected to play ball. Says the Arab woman formerly connected to al-Qaeda: “There was an understanding with the Pakistani army. We would get a tip-off that the army planned to raid one of our houses in the tribal area. We would flee but leave some ‘evidence’ behind so that the army could show to the Americans that we’d been there.”
CIA Director Leon Panetta said this week that “either [the Pakistanis] were involved or incompetent. Neither is a good place to be.” But Grenier suggests a more complex scenario: “I’m not giving an alibi for the Pakistanis, but it’s virtually inconceivable that Osama and those close to him would have voluntarily allowed their presence to be known by Pakistani officials, especially given the large number of his followers captured by Pakistan. We don’t trust the Pakistanis. Why should he?” On the other hand, he adds, “If his whereabouts were discovered by the Pakistani officials, I can envision them saying, ‘He’s keeping a low profile, and if we turn him over to the Americans, it will create a real firestorm for us.’ ” (Read more about the CIA’s rare public victory.)
Amal may be said to have leaped to her husband’s defense during the Seal raid, but her acquaintance interviewed by TIME remembers her as being shy and meek when she was first brought to Kandahar in 2000 and was staying with one of bin Laden’s other wives. “She was new. She was out of place. The sheik’s other wives were much older than she was. So were many of his sons,” the source claims.
Amal became bin Laden’s fifth wife. His first, Saada, never got over the fact that the billionaire’s son she married preferred a simple hut in Afghanistan to a palace back home. In 2000, bin Laden sent a trusted Yemeni aide, Abual Fida, on the hunt for a new bride. As Fida later told an interviewer, bin Laden wanted his new wife to be “religious, generous, well brought up, quiet, calm and young enough not to feel jealous of the sheik’s other wives.”
Despite the huge age gap between Amal and bin Laden, her family considered it an honor to marry off their daughter to him. The al-Qaeda chief reportedly paid $5,000 in jewelry and clothes for his teenage bride, who was then brought to Afghanistan to marry the grizzled warrior — already on the U.S. most-wanted list for his role in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. “To me, it’s astonishing that she came back to join him [in Pakistan],” says the source with former ties to al-Qaeda. “None of the other fighters brought back their wives.” But did the Pakistani authorities know that she had returned from Yemen? With bin Laden’s wife now in Pakistani custody, the White House won’t find out anytime soon.
Tim McGirk, a former TIME bureau chief, is a fellow at the University of California at Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program.
Kyaemon
May 11, 2011 at 10:06 pm
Diary: Bin Laden eyed new targets, big body count
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110511/ap_on_re_us/us_bin_laden
WASHINGTON – Deep in hiding, his terror organization becoming battered and fragmented, Osama bin Laden kept pressing followers to find new ways to hit the U.S., officials say, citing his private journal and other documents recovered in last week’s raid.
Strike smaller cities, bin Laden suggested. Target trains as well as planes. Above all, kill as many Americans as possible in a single attack.
Though he was out of the public eye and al-Qaida seemed to be weakening, bin Laden never yielded control of his worldwide organization, U.S. officials said Wednesday. His personal, handwritten journal and his massive collection of computer files reveal his hand at work in every recent major al-Qaida threat, including plots in Europe last year that had travelers and embassies on high alert, two officials said.
They described the intelligence to The Associated Press only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about what was found in bin Laden’s hideout. Analysts are continuing to review the documents.
The information shatters the government’s conventional thinking about bin Laden, who had been regarded for years as mostly an inspirational figurehead whose years in hiding made him too marginalized to maintain operational control of the organization he founded.
Instead, bin Laden was communicating from his walled compound in Pakistan with al-Qaida’s offshoots, including the Yemen branch that has emerged as the leading threat to the United States, the documents indicate. Though there is no evidence yet that he was directly behind the attempted Christmas Day 2009 bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner or the nearly successful attack on cargo planes heading for Chicago and Philadelphia, it’s now clear that they bear some of bin Laden’s hallmarks.
He was well aware of U.S. counterterrorist efforts and schooled his followers in working around them, the messages to his followers show. Don’t limit attacks to New York City, he said in his writings. Consider other areas such as Los Angeles or smaller cities. Spread out the targets.
In one particularly macabre bit of mathematics, bin Laden’s writings show him musing over just how many Americans he must kill to force the U.S. to withdraw from the Arab world. He concludes that the smaller, scattered attacks since 9/11 had not been enough. He tells his disciples that only a body count of thousands, something on the scale of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, would shift U.S. policy.
He also schemed about ways to sow political dissent in Washington and play political figures against one another, officials said.
The communications were in missives sent via plug-in computer storage devices called flash drives. The devices were ferried to bin Laden’s compound by couriers, a process that is slow but exceptionally difficult to track.
Intelligence officials have not identified any new planned targets or plots in their initial analysis of the 100 or so flash drives and five computers that Navy SEALs hauled away after killing bin Laden. Last week, the FBI and Homeland Security Department warned law enforcement officials nationwide to be on alert for possible attacks against trains, though officials said there was no specific plot.
Officials have not yet seen any indication that bin Laden had the ability to coordinate timing of attacks across the various al-Qaida affiliates in Pakistan, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq and Somalia, and it is also unclear from bin Laden’s documents how much the affiliate groups relied on his guidance. The Yemen group, for instance, has embraced the smaller-scale attacks that bin Laden’s writings indicate he regarded as unsuccessful. The Yemen branch had already surpassed his central operation as al-Qaida’s leading fundraising, propaganda and operational arm.
Al-Qaida has not named bin Laden’s successor, but all indications point to his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri. The question is whether al-Zawahri, or anyone, has the ability to keep so many disparate groups under the al-Qaida banner. The groups in Somalia and Algeria, for instance, have very different goals focused on local grievances. Without bin Laden to serve as their shepherd, it’s possible al-Qaida will further fragment.
British officials said the Americans had shared some information about the bin Laden cache but there had been nothing concrete yet to indicate his stamp on any of the recent terror attacks or plans in Britain — including a European plot last year involving the threat of a Mumbai-style shooting spree in a capital. Those officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters of intelligence.
Britain’s two largest terror attacks and plots — the 2005 suicide bombings and the trans-Atlantic liquid explosive plot to blow up several airliners in 2006 — both had trails that led back to Pakistan and al-Qaida figures, but there was never a direct link to bin Laden himself.
Most of the recent plots, including the stabbing of a lawmaker last year, have been traced to al-Qaida in Yemen and specifically Anwar al-Awlaki, British officials have said.
One British official said counterterror authorities had not been tracking bin Laden as they had other terrorists deemed more directly involved in operations — which may have been a mistake, from what they are now learning from bin Laden’s own words.
Kyaemon
May 13, 2011 at 12:20 am
How bin Laden emailed without being detected by US
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110512/ap_on_re_us/us_bin_laden_32
WASHINGTON – Despite having no Internet access in his hideout, Osama bin Laden was a prolific email writer who built a painstaking system that kept him one step ahead of the U.S. government’s best eavesdroppers.
His methods, described in new detail to The Associated Press by a counterterrorism official and a second person briefed on the U.S. investigation, served him well for years and frustrated Western efforts to trace him through cyberspace. The arrangement allowed bin Laden to stay in touch worldwide without leaving any digital fingerprints behind.
The people spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive intelligence analysis.
Bin Laden’s system was built on discipline and trust. But it also left behind an extensive archive of email exchanges for the U.S. to scour. The trove of electronic records pulled out of his compound after he was killed last week is revealing thousands of messages and potentially hundreds of email addresses, the AP has learned.
Holed up in his walled compound in northeast Pakistan with no phone or Internet capabilities, bin Laden would type a message on his computer without an Internet connection, then save it using a thumb-sized flash drive. He then passed the flash drive to a trusted courier, who would head for a distant Internet cafe.
At that location, the courier would plug the memory drive into a computer, copy bin Laden’s message into an email and send it. Reversing the process, the courier would copy any incoming email to the flash drive and return to the compound, where bin Laden would read his messages offline.
It was a slow, toilsome process. And it was so meticulous that even veteran intelligence officials have marveled at bin Laden’s ability to maintain it for so long. The U.S. always suspected bin Laden was communicating through couriers but did not anticipate the breadth of his communications as revealed by the materials he left behind.
Navy SEALs hauled away roughly 100 flash memory drives after they killed bin Laden, and officials said they appear to archive the back-and-forth communication between bin Laden and his associates around the world.
Al-Qaida operatives are known to change email addresses, so it’s unclear how many are still active since bin Laden’s death. But the long list of electronic addresses and phone numbers in the emails is expected to touch off a flurry of national security letters and subpoenas to Internet service providers. The Justice Department is already coming off a year in which it significantly increased the number of national security letters, which allow the FBI to quickly demand information from companies and others without asking a judge to formally issue a subpoena.
Officials gave no indication that bin Laden was communicating with anyone inside the U.S., but terrorists have historically used U.S.-based Internet providers or free Internet-based email services.
The cache of electronic documents is so enormous that the government has enlisted Arabic speakers from around the intelligence community to pore over it. Officials have said the records revealed no new terror plot but showed bin Laden remained involved in al-Qaida’s operations long after the U.S. had assumed he had passed control to his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri.
The files seized from bin Laden’s compound not only have the potential to help the U.S. find other al-Qaida figures, they may also force terrorists to change their routines. That could make them more vulnerable to making mistakes and being discovered.
Kyaemon
May 13, 2011 at 8:02 am
Pakistan Army Chief Balks at U.S. Demands to Cooperate
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/world/asia/13pakistan.html?_r=1&hp
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Despite mounting pressure from the United States since the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, seems unlikely to respond to American demands to root out other militant leaders, according to people who have met with him in the last 10 days.
While the general does not want to abandon the alliance completely, he is more likely to pursue a strategy of decreasing Pakistan’s reliance on the United States, and continuing to offer just enough cooperation to keep the billions of dollars in American aid flowing, said a confidant of the general who has spoken with him recently.
Such a response is certain to test American officials, who are more mistrustful of Pakistan than ever.
Emboldened by the May 2 raid that killed Bin Laden in Pakistan, American officials say they now have greater leverage to force Pakistani cooperation in hunting down Taliban and Qaeda leaders so the United States can end the war in Afghanistan.
The United States will now push harder than ever for General Kayani to break relations with other militant leaders who American officials believe are hiding in Pakistan, with the support of the military and intelligence service, a senior American official said.
These leaders include Mullah Muhammad Omar, the spiritual leader of the Afghan Taliban; the allied militant network of Sirajuddin Haqqani; and Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group that the United States holds responsible for the terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, in 2008, the American official said.
Pakistani officials, meanwhile, are anxiously waiting to see if any new intelligence about Al Qaeda in Pakistan spills from the American raid that could be used to exert more pressure on them, and what form that pressure might take.
But those who have spoken with General Kayani recently said that demands to break with top militant leaders were likely to be too much for the military chief, who is scheduled to address an unusual, closed-door joint session of Parliament on Friday to salvage his reputation and explain the military’s lapses surrounding the American raid.
The American wish list is tantamount to an overnight transformation of Pakistan’s long held strategic posture that calls for using the militant groups as proxies against Pakistan’s neighbors, they said. It comes as General Kayani faces mounting anti-American pressure from hard-line generals in his top command, two of the people who met with him said.
Many in the lower ranks of the military have greater sympathy for the militant groups than for the United States.
While the general does not want to abandon the alliance completely, he is more likely to pursue a strategy of decreasing Pakistan’s reliance on the United States, and continuing to offer just enough cooperation to keep the billions of dollars in American aid flowing, said a confidant of the general who has spoken with him recently.
Such a response is certain to test American officials, who are more mistrustful of Pakistan than ever.
Emboldened by the May 2 raid that killed Bin Laden in Pakistan, American officials say they now have greater leverage to force Pakistani cooperation in hunting down Taliban and Qaeda leaders so the United States can end the war in Afghanistan.
The United States will now push harder than ever for General Kayani to break relations with other militant leaders who American officials believe are hiding in Pakistan, with the support of the military and intelligence service, a senior American official said.
These leaders include Mullah Muhammad Omar, the spiritual leader of the Afghan Taliban; the allied militant network of Sirajuddin Haqqani; and Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group that the United States holds responsible for the terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, in 2008, the American official said.
Pakistani officials, meanwhile, are anxiously waiting to see if any new intelligence about Al Qaeda in Pakistan spills from the American raid that could be used to exert more pressure on them, and what form that pressure might take.
But those who have spoken with General Kayani recently said that demands to break with top militant leaders were likely to be too much for the military chief, who is scheduled to address an unusual, closed-door joint session of Parliament on Friday to salvage his reputation and explain the military’s lapses surrounding the American raid.
The American wish list is tantamount to an overnight transformation of Pakistan’s long held strategic posture that calls for using the militant groups as proxies against Pakistan’s neighbors, they said. It comes as General Kayani faces mounting anti-American pressure from hard-line generals in his top command, two of the people who met with him said.
Many in the lower ranks of the military have greater sympathy for the militant groups than for the United States.
To take out the leadership of these groups — longtime assets of the Pakistani Army and intelligence services — would result in such a severe backlash from the militants that a “civil war” in Pakistan would result, said a former senior Pakistani official who was consulted by General Kayani in the aftermath of the Bin Laden raid.
The general, who has been courted for nearly three years by the United States’ most senior military officers in an effort to persuade him to launch an attack against the Haqqani network in North Waziristan, was even more unlikely to do so now, the Pakistani said.
While increasingly frustrated with Pakistan, American officials would also like to avoid a complete rupture of relations with a nuclear-armed state that is essential to ending the war in neighboring Afghanistan.
With the United States eager to wind down in Afghanistan, Washington needs Pakistan more than ever, a factor that would play into the general’s next moves, said Gen. Javed Ashraf Qazi, a former director general of Pakistan’s chief spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, who met with General Kayani recently.
“Without Pakistani support, the United States cannot win the battle in Afghanistan,” he said. “Now the Americans are saying, please bring the Taliban to the table.”
The army chief was described as angered that the Obama administration failed to trust him enough to tell him before the raid, asserting that in keeping him in the dark the United States had alienated Pakistan’s best friend, General Qazi said.
General Kayani cannot ignore the sentiment of his soldiers, said Riaz Khokhar, a former ambassador to the United States, who met with General Kayani.
“There is a feeling in the rank and file of the army from A to Z that the United States is a most untrustworthy ally,” Mr. Khokhar said.
“We don’t want to be an enemy of the United States, but the experience of friendship with the United States has not been a pleasant experience, so we have to find a middle road,” he said.
General Qazi said hard questions were being asked about whether the American financial support to the Pakistani military was “worth the lives we have lost” in fighting Islamic militants.
Since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States has granted more than $20 billion in military and development assistance, an amount that does not include covert aid, according to K. Alan Kronstadt , the South Asian Affairs specialist at the Congressional Research Service.
Cutting ties would be extremely costly for the Pakistani military, said Shuja Nawaz , head of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington.
Anti-Pakistan sentiment was hardening in Congress as Pakistan waited for approval of payment arrears for its costs in fighting insurgents, Mr. Nawaz said.
In the short term, however, General Kayani seemed to be more concerned with the blow to the morale of his troops than with further damage to the already eroded relationship with the United States, according to the accounts from those who met him.
General Kayani visited six army garrisons this week in an effort to dispel doubts about the army and his leadership.
During his appearances, according to soldiers interviewed afterward, General Kayani acknowledged an intelligence failure in not knowing that Bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad. But he added that this did not mean that Pakistan was to be “blamed for everything.”
Kyaemon
May 13, 2011 at 7:39 pm
For SEAL Team 6, an exception to the rule
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-house-bin-laden-resolution-20110510,0,2581333.story
By Kathleen Hennessey
May 10, 2011, 4:44 p.m.
After instituting a ban on honorary resolutions — like those commemorating “National Asparagus Month” — House Republicans may have found a way to make an exception for a weightier subject.
A resolution honoring the military forces involved in the Osama bin Laden mission is expected to come to the floor as an amendment to an intelligence spending bill later this week, a House leadership aide said Tuesday.
The Senate passed a similar measure last week. But at the time, House leaders said they wouldn’t be following suit, citing the newly instituted prohibition on taking up a measure that expresses “appreciation, commends, congratulates, celebrates, recognizes the accomplishments of, or celebrates the anniversary of” any entity.
House rules, however, only prohibit stand-alone resolution, and do not bar such measures if they are introduced as amendments, the aide said.
The rule, enacted when House Republicans took the helm in January, was intended to keep trivial measures from clogging up the schedule. Lawmakers have a known penchant for wanting to pay tribute to vegetables, race tracks and ancient thinkers on the House floor, as Times reporters Rich Simon and Lisa Mascaro noted back in November.
While some mourned the loss of the chance to pass homage to Confucius, few raised concerns that the new ban would prevent the House from recognizing significant moments in history. When that seemed to the case, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said leaders had found a more substantial way to honor the special forces. They expedited consideration of an intelligence spending bill.
Kyaemon
May 13, 2011 at 8:13 pm
Exclusive: Taliban leader details final visit with bin Laden
http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailybeast/20110513/ts_dailybeast/14074_talibancommanderosamabinladenwasnotisolated;_ylt=AvwoK5YXyrqOJGN1pFG9DfRH2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTRhYmIycWYzBGFzc2V0A2RhaWx5YmVhc3QvMjAxMTA1MTMvMTQwNzRfdGFsaWJhbmNvbW1hbmRlcm9zYW1hYmlubGFkZW53YXNub3Rpc29sYXRlZARjY29kZQN0b3BnbXBlBGNwb3MDMwRwb3MDMwRzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3JpZXMEc2xrA2V4Y2x1c2l2ZXRhbA–
NEW YORK – In an exclusive interview, a senior Taliban official says the terrorist leader was hardly a hermit. Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau on his extensive meetings with aides and money-men.
If a senior Afghan Taliban commander is to be believed, Osama bin Laden was not as isolated in his final years as many people think. In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, the guerrilla chieftain, who for years has provided information that proved reliable, says he visited the late al Qaeda leader two years ago in his high-walled hideout in the Pakistani military town of Abbottabad. He says bin Laden, who was killed in a midnight raid by Navy SEALs on May 2, also received occasional visits from al Qaeda and Taliban leaders and Arab fundraisers.
Although U.S. intelligence officials acknowledge that bin Laden was “an active player,” operating an “active command and control center” at his compound, their assumption was that he communicated with his followers almost exclusively via computer memory sticks delivered by relays of couriers. On the contrary, however, his meetings now seem not to have been limited to one or two trusted couriers, but instead to have included face-to-face huddles with fellow plotters right under the noses of the Pakistani military and its intelligence agents.
The commander, a member of the Peshawar shura that controls insurgent operations in eastern Afghanistan, still refuses to disclose just what he discussed with bin Laden, but says the meeting was arranged by an unnamed senior al Qaeda leader. Asking not to be named for security reasons, he says that he and bin Laden became close in the late 1990s, when the al Qaeda founder was based in eastern Afghanistan’s largest city, Jalalabad. At the time, the commander held an important position in the region, and bin Laden came to trust him. “The Sheik [as bin Laden’s followers call him] was my best friend,” the commander says. “We used to meet in Jalalabad.”
When the commander saw him again in Abbottabad, he seemed healthy enough, and well briefed on recent developments. “The Sheik was in good shape in mind and body,” the commander recalls. Nevertheless, he was struck by how bin Laden had changed in the years since 9/11. “The Sheik was not the same Sheik I had seen before the Americans attacked,” he says. “He looked tired and certainly was concerned about his safety and financial matters.” Nevertheless, bin Laden displayed more energy than the commander had expected before the Abbottabad visit. “I was surprised,” he says. “He seemed much more alive and active than I had thought.”
He said fundraising was crucial, but he limited the number of contributors he saw because of the risk. He was afraid these face-to-face meetings would lead his enemies to his house.â€
Bin Laden said he had been forced to keep working hard because he had lost so many of his senior lieutenants. “The Sheik told me of all of his top aides who had been killed or captured,” he says. “So he said he had no choice but to be active and meet people, despite the security risks.” The visitors included senior aides: “He said he was meeting with other top al Qaeda leaders who could get access to Abbottabad without endangering their safety.” The commander recalls that two other men were present during the meeting but that neither one said a word. They were not bin Laden’s sons, he says. And bin Laden spoke of having direct contacts with money men from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. “He said fundraising was crucial, but he limited the number of contributors he saw because of the risk,” the commander says. “He was afraid these face-to-face meetings would lead his enemies to his house.”
In fact, the world’s most-wanted fugitive said, he had chosen to live in Abbottabad just because he considered it such an “unexpected” place for him to hole up. What scared him most wasn’t America’s spy agencies, he told the commander; it was Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. “The Sheik feared the ISI more than the CIA,” the commander says.
While discussing the Afghan insurgents’ war against the Americans, bin Laden said he had heard no news of the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, since 2001. Even so, the al Qaeda leader seemed upbeat. “The Sheik told me not to worry,” the commander recalls. “He said things will get better for the Taliban.” He nevertheless insists that although al Qaeda has provided moral and spiritual support to the insurgents, as well as some manpower, the Taliban never received “a single dollar” from bin Laden.
***
Separately, a senior ISI officer tells The Daily Beast that Pakistani interrogators have learned little from questioning bin Laden’s three wives, who were picked up by Pakistani security forces after the American raid on the compound. “The interrogations of the women have been rather useless,” says the officer. “The women had no idea of his jihadi activities.” He says the women were sequestered in the house and were not privy to bin Laden’s activities or interactions with any of his lieutenants. This is not surprising, he says; the ISI had learned equally little from interrogating the wives of other al Qaeda operatives, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin Al-Shibh. “These Arabs traditionally don’t share much if anything at all with their women,” the officer says. “We only know that the wives were kept in the house for a long time, never allowed to leave and were never involved in his meetings or work.”
Sami Yousafzai is Newsweek’s correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he has covered militancy, al Qaeda, and the Taliban for the magazine since 9/11. He was born in Afghanistan but moved to Pakistan with his family after the Russian invasion in 1979. He began his career as a sports journalist but switched to war reporting in 1997.
Ron Moreau is Newsweek’s Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent and has been covering the region for the magazine the past 10 years. Since he first joined Newsweek during the Vietnam War, he has reported extensively from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Kyaemon
May 13, 2011 at 9:38 pm
Pakistan’s military general cancels U.S. visit
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2011-05/13/c_13873928.htm
ISLAMABAD, May 13 (Xinhua) — Pakistan’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee General Khalid Shamim Wynne canceled his visit to the United States as relationship between the two allies is under stress after the U.S. killed Osama bin Laden in a unilateral raid in Pakistan, local media reported on Friday.
Quoting military sources the private TV channel Express reported that General Wynne was scheduled to pay a six-day visit to the U.S. from May 22 but he had canceled his visit.
There was no official word as to why the visit was canceled and military sources said that the U.S. had been informed about the visit’s postponement.
Geo TV reported that General Wynne called the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, and told he would not be able to travel to the United States.
The visit was canceled amidst reports that Chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations, John Kerry, will shortly visit Pakistan.
Officials said that General Wynne had himself canceled his U.S. visit and not on the U.S. request to put pressure on Washington to consider Pakistan a partner in the anti-terror war and stop unilateral actions on Pakistani soil.
Anger runs high in Pakistan after the U.S. military helicopters raided a compound where Osama bin Laden had been living. The Pakistani government and the army are under criticism as to why the country’s radar system and intelligence agencies failed to detect the movement of the American helicopters.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani told a foreign magazine on Thursday that cooperation between the CIA and Pakistani spy agency had been broken down.
Pakistan’s Defense Committee of the Cabinet, which comprises the country’s top military and political leadership, on Thursday strongly condemned the U.S. unilateral action on Pakistani soil and warned against any such action in the future.
Top military and foreign affairs officials in off-the-record briefings in recent days showed anger at the U.S. action and said Pakistan will review its relations with the U.S. if any such action was carried out in future.
The parliament has started its in-camera session in Islamabad on Friday to review the situation after the U.S. military action. The army and intelligence chief will brief the members of the parliament about the U.S. operation.
Kyaemon
May 14, 2011 at 6:56 pm
Terrorism Trial Poses Test for Strained Pakistan Ties – WSJ.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703730804576321572822353198.html?mod=WSJ_World_LEFTSecondNews
CHICAGO—A Pakistan-born doctor with alleged ties to the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack will be tried in federal court here next week in a case that threatens to test already strained relations between the U.S. and Pakistan.
Prosecutors say Tahawwur Hussain Rana helped his high-school friend, Pakistani-American David Coleman Headley, conduct surveillance ahead of a three-day attack that killed more than 160 people, including six Americans. Mr. Rana also is accused of helping Mr. Headley in a bomb plot against a Danish newspaper.
Mr. Headley, who pleaded guilty in connection with his role in the Mumbai attacks, will testify against his old friend in return for being spared the death penalty. What makes the case potentially explosive is the chance it will provide an inside look at the Pakistani government’s posture toward terrorism. The question has taken on greater urgency since U.S. Navy SEALs killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a home in Pakistan two weeks ago.
Mr. Headley is expected to testify that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, was directly involved in plotting the Mumbai attacks carried out by the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba terror group in November 2008. Mr. Headley is also expected to testify that Mr. Rana knew of his work on behalf of ISI and allowed Mr. Headley to use Mr. Rana’s immigration business as a cover.
Defense attorneys have signaled in court filings that Mr. Rana’s defense relies heavily on his assertions about the ISI’s role in aiding the Mumbai terrorists. Court filings remain sealed, but in an April ruling, U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber quoted from a defense motion that Mr. Rana had acted “at the behest of the Pakistani government and the ISI, not the Lashkar terrorist organization.”
Bin Laden’s hiding place two miles from the elite Pakistan Military Academy has prompted U.S. and Indian accusations that some elements of Pakistan’s military helped shelter him. The U.S. has given Pakistan $20 billion of aid since 2001 and U.S. lawmakers recently have called for rethinking U.S. strategy there.
Prosecutors have charged six other men besides Mr. Rana. In court filings, defense lawyers identified several as Pakistani intelligence officers. All are fugitives. Mr. Rana, 50 years old, will be the only defendant in court.
U.S. prosecutors refer to the co-defendants only as being leaders of Lashkar-e-Taiba. Co-defendant Ilyas Kashmiri is a former Pakistani commando who U.S. officials say leads a terror group believed to be allied with al Qaeda. Another defendant is identified by the U.S. as a retired former major in the Pakistani military.
A spokesman for the Pakistan embassy in Washington said the allegations of Pakistani involvement in the plots were being “made up for the sake of defense.…There is no involvement, or complicity, by any state institution, or any Pakistani security official.”
The potential of ISI ties has been front-page news in India, where attention has focused on what Mr. Headley will say about his interactions with ISI. Indian authorities, who were allowed by the U.S. to conduct interviews of Mr. Headley in prison, produced a dossier that identifies Mr. Rana’s co-defendants as ISI officers.
Lashkar-e-Taiba was founded 20 years ago as a proxy for the Pakistani military to battle forces of India in the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir. Pakistan’s military says it has since cut ties to the group.
U.S. authorities arrested Mr. Headley in 2009 in Chicago as he allegedly prepared to depart to Pakistan to plot an attack against the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in Copenhagen, which had published unflattering cartoons of Muhammad. In 2010, Mr. Headley pleaded guilty to a dozen counts, including plotting the Mumbai attack and the attack on the Denmark newspaper that never happened.
The trial is expected to include secretly recorded conversations, emails and Mr. Headley’s testimony.
Mr. Rana, who wears glasses and a graying beard, said he was duped into helping an old friend, whom he thought was working with ISI.
Charles Swift, Mr. Rana’s attorney, said, “Nothing that Mr. Rana did in and of itself is criminal; he didn’t go and buy guns; he didn’t go and provide funds. The question is, did he hire an old friend and not know what he was up to, and or did he know what David Headley was up to?”
The jury must also decide whether Mr. Headley, 50 years old, is a reliable witness. Born in Washington to an American mother and Pakistani father, he was raised in Pakistan and met Mr. Rana at an elite military boarding school there.
After graduating from high school, he returned to the U.S. and was twice arrested for selling drugs. He became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration. In the late 1990s, he opened two video-rental stores in New York City and immersed himself in Islam.
Mr. Rana became a military doctor and later moved to Canada before buying a home in Chicago. He started a number of businesses, including First World Immigration Services.
Chicago Trial May Unmask Pakistan’s Links to Militants – NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/world/asia/15headley.html?_r=1&hp
Kyaemon
May 14, 2011 at 7:13 pm
Interview: Killing of bin Laden won’t change anti-terrorism situation: Italian expert
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2011-05/11/c_13870253.htm
MILAN, Italy, May 11 (Xinhua) — The killing of Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden will not create significant changes in the international fight against terrorism because the organization was defeated years ago, an Italian expert says.
“Al-Qaida has weakened following the U.S. and NATO intervention in Afghanistan after the Twin Tower terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001,” Andrea Carati, an associate research fellow at the Milan-based ISPI institute of international politics, told Xinhua recently.
“Over the past years, Afghanistan has become a non-hospitable country to al-Qaida, which was defeated,” he said.
Carati said the terrorist organization’s relations with the Taliban have also worsened and funding has significantly decreased.
In fact, he said, major attacks such as the ones in New York (2001), Madrid (2004) and London (2005) on al-Qaida’ s so-called “far enemies” have not been carried out anymore.
“Therefore there is no reason to think that the international menace of terrorism would increase after the killing of bin Laden, neither in the U.S. nor in Europe,” Carati said adding that, however, more stringent controls are necessary to deter some possible isolated “hot-heated” reactions.
In fact, he said, the power of an organization to plan such attacks is not to be underestimated although it may have been exaggerated by Western “hypersensitivity” following the Twin Tower tragedy.
In Carati’s view, the killing of the al-Qaida leader, which can be proven both by the non-existence of new messages from him as well as by DNA testing, for two reasons will have only minimal effect on the international fight against terrorism.
First, he said, al-Qaida is an “horizontal” organization without a hierarchic structure, That, he said, makes it flexible and able to reorganize in different ways and countries by moving its operation centers from Afghanistan to the Maghreb, especially Algeria, and Yemen.
“Secondly, bin Laden was one of the founders of al-Qaida and its strategic leader, but he had not a role in the tactic organization of terrorist attacks. He was not, and may had never been, the organization’s operative commander anymore,” Carati said.
Due to that, he said, the organization’s operative commands will not particularly suffer from bin Laden’s death.
“It is probable that al-Qaida second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri will continue to be the ideological and strategic guide but it is not excluded that a role division phase may open within the organization,” he said.
Carati said that capturing bin Laden instead of killing him would have opened an “international-level negotiation and legal chapter with consequences very difficult to control.”
In his view, the killing was the result of complex intelligence work started before Barack Obama was elected U.S. president in 2008.
“The killing of bin Laden was also an important achievement for Obama himself, as in the past 20-30 years the U.S. had not believed that a Democratic president could be efficient enough in the international fight against terrorism,” he said.
Now, a new period will start of reorganization of international relations, the researcher said, predicting that the U.S. will not soon retire its troops from Afghanistan.
“Regarding Pakistan, which to some extents has collaborated with the U.S. in the past years, it will have to further commit itself in the fight against terrorism in order to gain credibility,” he said.
Pakistan, the researcher said, is a necessary ally for the U.S. for many reasons, including its possess of nuclear weapons.
Carati also noted that “some ambiguities are unavoidable on the international scene, as it is difficult to divide the world into clear alignments.”
Kyaemon
May 18, 2011 at 1:35 am
AP sources: Raiders knew mission a one-shot deal
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110517/ap_on_re_us/us_bin_laden_raid
WASHINGTON – Those who planned the secret mission to get Osama bin Laden in Pakistan knew it was a one-shot deal, and it nearly went terribly wrong.
The U.S. deliberately hid the operation from Pakistan, and predicted that national outrage over the breach of Pakistani sovereignty would make it impossible to try again if the raid on bin Laden’s suspected redoubt came up dry.
Once the raiders reached their target, things started to go awry almost immediately, officials briefed on the operation said.
Adding exclusive new details to the account of the assault on bin Laden’s hideout, officials described just how the SEAL raiders loudly ditched a foundering helicopter right outside bin Laden’s door, ruining the plan for a surprise assault. That forced them to abandon plans to run a squeeze play on bin Laden — simultaneously entering the house stealthily from the roof and the ground floor.
Instead, they busted into the ground floor and began a floor-by-floor storming of the house, working up to the top level where they had assumed bin Laden — if he was in the house — would be.
They were right.
The raiders came face-to-face with bin Laden in a hallway outside his bedroom, and three of the Americans stormed in after him, U.S. officials briefed on the operation told The Associated Press. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a classified operation.
Kyaemon
November 9, 2011 at 3:00 am
ဘင်လာဒင် သေဆုံးပုံ ဖြစ်ရပ်အမှန်ကို ဖော်ထုတ်တဲ့စာအုပ် ထွက်လာပြိ၊
အသံတိုး ဟဲလီကော့တာ helicopterက ခေါင်မိုးပေါ်ဝဲတဲ့အချိန်ကစပြီး ၁ဝ စက်ကန့်အတွင်းပင် SEALS အထူးတပ်သားတို့က ခေါင်းမိုးပေါ်ရောက်နင့်နေပြီး…..(အသေးစိတ် ဆက် ဘတ် နိုင)်
Myths of the Bin Laden Raid
Nov 6, 2011 10:17 PM EST
There was no running gunfight. And the SEALs did not have a kill order. Richard Miniter on the new book detailing the night al Qaeda’s chief died—and the headaches it could cause Obama.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/06/new-book-details-seals-raid-that-killed-osama-bin-laden.html
Osama bin Laden did not hear the SEALs’ stealthy helicopter until it hovered over the roof of his three-story home and the chopper’s spinning blades smashed his plastic patio chairs against his bedroom window.
In less than 10 seconds, the SEALs had jumped onto the roof, crawled across the rain-stained tiles, and descended onto bin Laden’s patio. The bearded terror leader sleepily opened his bedroom door and then, spotting two armed men with night-vision gear coming down the hall toward him, quickly slammed it.
They were right behind him.
As the SEALs forced open the bedroom door, they heard bin Laden’s youngest wife screaming in Arabic while raising a blanket to block their view. Behind the rising blanket, they saw bin Laden scrambling for an AKSU machine pistol.
As she tried to shield him, bin Laden shoved his wife into the line of fire. It was the last thing he did.
The first round went into the mattress behind bin Laden. The other three rounds found their mark as the two SEALs fired as one.
Bin Laden’s pistol now hangs on the wall of SEAL Team Six’s Virginia base, beside the photos of comrades killed in action.
These are the kinds of inside details that emerge from Chuck Pfarrer’s new book SEAL Target Geronimo.
Pfarrer certainly had access. A SEAL Team Six assault-element commander in the 1980s, he is known inside the intelligence community for his well-regarded first book, Warrior Soul, and inside Hollywood for writing and producing movies including Navy SEALs, Hard Target, and Virus. He clearly had detailed conversations with senior officers in the SEALs’ chain of command (especially Adm. William McRaven and then–SEAL Team Six commander Scott Kerr) and understands the vocabulary and the culture very well.
But some details in his book could complicate the 2012 presidential race. Pfarrer reports that the White House overruled the Navy plan to have two F-18 Hornets provide air support for SEALs helicopters, which would have been easily shot down if found by Pakistan’s Air Force. Also scrubbed were the latest-generation stealth helicopters, known as “ghost hawks.” The SEALs would have to make do with the older Stealth Hawks, which had mechanical problems. Ultimately, one crash-landed due to faulty electronics and had to be demolished on the site. Each of these decisions—to deny fighter support and to use older helicopters—may have been sound. Putting fighters in Pakistani airspace or allowing the Pakistanis to see the latest technology might have complicated relations between America and its Janus-faced ally, Pakistan. Republicans may have been reluctant to attack the president over an achievement that even Dick Cheney applauded. Still, Pfarrer’s findings could fuel critics of the president who think he was quick to take personal credit and play politics with the SEALs’ successful mission.
Obama may also have trouble explaining why he publicly announced bin Laden’s death just hours after it occurred. The SEALs captured 12 garbage bags worth of notebooks, hard drives, satellite phones, and other digital devices. The data could have been used to launch surprise raids on all the senior members of the al Qaeda network, while the leaders turned on each other and wondered who the traitor was. For the SEALs and other special operators I’ve spoken with, that was the natural next move. Al Qaeda could have been rolled up in six months. Pfarrer captures the SEALs’ resentment of the president, whom they see as publicity-seeking. He ignores the White House’s concerns: the nation had waited almost 10 years for bin Laden to be brought to justice, and that news might have leaked.
Pfarrer also does his best to poke the CIA in the eye. He points out that the agency insisted on having one of its officers in on the raid. While we are repeatedly told that the CIA man had little experience “fast-roping” down for helicopters and doesn’t have the training that the SEALs do (who does?), only in an aside are we informed that he was the only one who could speak Arabic and other local languages. He was the only man who could interview the prisoners or quiet the women and children in the compound. Also, the CIA’s role in locating bin Laden is dismissed in a throwaway paragraph. That’s unfair. The CIA took a few clues from the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational planner of the 9/11 attacks, and located bin Laden’s trusted courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Then the agency persuaded a colonel in Pakistan’s feared intelligence agency, the ISI, to provide key documents, including the plans for bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. CIA officers rented apartments and surveilled the bin Laden compound for months, until they could persuade their superiors to deploy satellites. And so on. The CIA’s role in the operation remains an exciting, but untold, story………page 2
Foreign Resident
November 9, 2011 at 6:15 am
” Stealth Hawk ” ဟယ်လီကော့ပတာက အသံငြိမ်လွန်းလို့
ခေါင်းပေါ်ရောက်တဲ့အထိ ဘင်လာဒင် ရော ပါကစ္စတန် စစ်တပ် ရော မသိကြဘူးတဲ့ ။
ဒါတောင် နောက်ဆုံးပေါ် ဟယ်လီကော့ပတာ “ ghost hawk ” ကို
သုံးခွင့် မပေးသေးဘူးတဲ့ ။
ကြေးမုံရေ MIT ကနေ US Armed Force ကို မကြာခင်မှာ ပေးအပ်မယ်ဆိုတဲ့
ကိုယ်ပျောက် ဝတ်စုံကိစ္စကော ဘာကြားသေးတုန်းဗျ ။
အင်းးးးးးးး
B-52 နှင့် B-2 တွေက လေကြောင်းရန်ကာကွယ်ရေးလက်နက်တွေ
လက်လှမ်းမမှီတဲ့ ပေ ၄၀၀၀ဝ အမြင့်ကနေ
ဗုံးတွေကို ပန်းကြဲနေသလို အေးအေးဆေးဆေး ကြဲချ ။
ကိုယ်ပျောက် ဝတ်စုံ နှင့် အမေရိကန်စစ်သားက
ဗုံးကျရမယ့် နေရာကို Infra Red Pointer လေးနှင့်
ပန်းချီဆွဲသလို လိုက်လိုက်ထောက်ပေးနေယုံပဲ ။
ခံရတဲ့ ရန်သူခမျာ မတော့ ” လမိုက်ညမှာ အအကို သရဲအလိုးခံရသလို ”
အသေအကြေ ခံတော့ ခံနေရတယ်
ဘယ်သူက ဘယ်နေရာကနေ ဘယ်လိုနှိပ်နေမှန်းလည်း မသိ
ဘယ်သူ့ကို ဘာကို ဘယ်လို ပြန်ပြော ပြန်လုပ် ရမှန်းလည်း မသိ ဖြစ်နေမှာ ။
ဘုရား သကြား မ လို့
အမေရိကန်နိုင်ငံ နှင့် ရန်သူမဖြစ်ပါရစေနှင့် ။
ဘုရား ဘုရား ဘုရား
Kyaemon
November 10, 2011 at 11:53 am
ကိုဖော ခင်ဗျား
ကိုယ်ပျောက် ဝတ်စုံ နဲ့ပတ်သက်တာ အောက်ပါ ကိုတွေ့လိုက်ပါတယ်
ကနေဒါ စစ်တပ်ကသုံးတာတွေ့လို့ Guy Cramer ကပိုကောင်းအောင် ဒီစိုင် ပုံစံထွင်၊ Cramer ဆီက မှာယူပြီး ဂျော်ဒန်ဘုရင်Abdullah ကသူ့စစ်တပ်အတွက် တောင်သုံးနေပြီလို့တွေ့တယ်၊
လုံးဝကိုယ်ပျောက်တော့ မဟုတ်ပါ၊
Cramer’s Camouflage Helps Troops Stay Stealthy
http://www.wbur.org/npr/138791918/cramers-camouflage-helps-troops-hide
…..He posted his redesign online to bolster his case for government overspending and a few months later, it caught the eye of the King of Jordan. Cramer now designs uniforms for troops in a dozen countries through his camouflage design company, HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp…….
————————————
ဒရုန်း stealth drone ကိုယ်ပျောက်တိုက်လေယာဉ် အကြောင်း
USAF reveals RQ-170 Sentinel is new stealth UAV
By Stephen Trimble
A stealthy unmanned aircraft system developed by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works division has secretly joined the US Air Force inventory.
http://lalqila.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/americans-are-flying-rq-170-sentinel-stealth-drones-from-kandahar-into-pakistani-airspace-were-they-only-looking-or-osama-bin-laden-or-are-they-really-looking-for-pakistans-nuclear-assets-do-pak/
Foreign Resident
November 10, 2011 at 12:50 pm
ဟုတ်ဖူး ကို Kyae Mon ရဲ့
ကို Kyae Mon ပြောတာတွေက still Camouflage အဆင့်လောက်ပဲရှိသေးတာ ။
ကျွန်တော် ဆိုလိုတာက Herry Potter ထဲကလို လုံးဝ ကိုယ်ပျောက်သွားရမှာ ။
ကျွန်တော် အမှတ် မမှားဘူးဆိုရင်
လွန်ခဲ့တဲ့ ၅ နှစ်လောက်က University of California at Berkeley က
US Armed Force ကို ၂ နှစ်အတွင်း
ကိုယ်ပျောက်ဝတ်စုံကို ပေးအပ်မယ်ဆိုပြီး ကြေငြာသွားတယ်ဗျ ။
ကောလာဟလတွေအရလည်း အီရတ်စစ်ပွဲမှာ
ရိပ်ရိပ် ရိပ်ရိပ် နှင့် အရိပ်လောက်ပဲမြင်ရတဲ့
အမေရိကန်စစ်သား တွေ ရှိနေပြီလို့ ကြားနေရတယ် ။
ကိုယ်ပျောက်ဝတ်စုံကို US Armed Force ကစသုံးနေပြီ ထင်ရတယ် ။
အောက်က VDO လင့်တွေမှာ ကြည့်ကြည့်ပါ ။
—http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zKQe-1BUFQ—
—http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD83dqSfC0Y—
—http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPqCyTrlb_A—
အောက်ကဟာတွေကတော့ Wiki က Info တွေပါ ။
—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_camouflage—
—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking_device—
ရှူံးနိမ့်မှုများနဲ့.. လူ
November 9, 2011 at 6:39 am
အန်ကယ်ဖောရေ.. စစ်ရေး၊ စစ်မှုတွေတော့ အတော်လေး လေ့လာပုံရတယ်။ စစ်ပညာဂျာနယ်တောင်မှ အဲလောက် Update မဖြစ်ဘူး။ အန်ကယ်ဖောအနေနဲ့ ကိုယ်သိထားတာလေးတွေကို ပြန်ရှယ်သင့်တယ် ထင်တယ်နော်။ ဘာတဲ့..ဟုတ်မဟုတ်တော့မသိဘူး၊ နိုင်ငံတော်သမ္မတဖြစ်ဖို့ စစ်မှုရေးရာလဲ ကျွမ်းကျင်ဖို့လိုတယ်ဆိုလား?
ဒီတော့ သင်ကြားပြသပေးပါဦးလို့
For Kyaemon,
I really appreciate your writing skills, but I have to tell you something. That is we are not professional in English. Because of our education level. Even a professor of any University, they can’t write their research in English. So please, if you really wish to our citizens to fluent in English, let them how to learn English and you should write an English Lesson on this page.
Thanks for your update.
Kyaemon
November 10, 2011 at 12:27 pm
Dear ရှူံးနိမ့်..လူ
Thanks for your gracious comments.
Each blogger, (including yourself), is serving our community in one way or the other, contributing valuable time and knowledge. Some postings really take a lot of time.
As you know, everyone has a time constraint to this effort, with family and work commitments.
For now, I hope you can find someone to do this noble project.