Osama’s Compound in Abbottabad

The Floor That Didn’t Exist

The compound was a perfect place for a discreet yet comfortable retirement.

It was to the placid environs of Abbottabad that bin Laden, half a decade after his great victory on 9/11, decided to escape. By the spring of 2011, the terrorist mastermind was in his sixth year of hiding out in the city’s Bilal Town neighborhood (see the timeline of bin Laden’s post-Sept. 11 movements below). With its porticoed white villas interspersed with small shops selling fruits and vegetables, it is certainly a pleasant place to live. Sometime in 2005, bin Laden’s compound began rising from what had once been open fields. During construction, a third floor was added to the main building. No planning permission was sought for this addition (see the original compound blueprints), a common enough dodge in a part of the world where paying property taxes is regarded as a sucker’s game.

But there was a more compelling reason to keep this alteration as secret as possible: the unauthorized floor was for the exclusive use of bin Laden and Amal, the spirited Yemeni who was his newest and youngest wife (one of three living at the compound, along with a dozen of his children and grandchildren). The third floor was a little different from the others. It had windows on only one of its four sides, and they were opaque. Four of the five windows were just slits well above eye level. A small terrace leading off the floor was shielded from prying eyes by a 7-ft.-high wall designed to conceal even someone as tall as the 6-ft. 4-in. bin Laden. Habitually dressed in light-colored flowing robes, a dark vest and a prayer cap, bin Laden rarely left the second and third floors of the house during the more than five years he lived there. When he did, it was only to take a brief walk in the compound’s kitchen garden. A makeshift tarpaulin over a section of the garden was designed to keep even those walks a secret from the all-seeing U.S. satellites that traversed the skies overhead.

Inside its walls the compound was bare of paint, and in keeping with bin Laden’s orthodox beliefs, there were no pictures. It had no air-conditioning and only a few rudimentary gas heaters–in an area where summers can top 100F and winters mean snow. As a result, the electricity and gas bills were relatively minuscule, averaging $50 a month. Beds for the various family members were made from simple planks of plywood. It was as if the compound’s inhabitants were living at a makeshift but long-term campsite.

In his top-floor sanctuary, bin Laden whiled away the days with his wife Amal. The bedroom ceiling was low for a man as tall as bin Laden. A tiny bathroom off to the side had green tile on the walls but not on the floor, a rudimentary toilet that was no more than a hole in the ground, over which they had to squat, and a cheap plastic shower. In this bathroom, bin Laden regularly applied Just for Men dye to his hair and beard to try to maintain a youthful appearance now that he was midway through his sixth decade. Next to the bedroom was a kitchen the size of a large closet. Across the hall was bin Laden’s study, where he kept his books on crude wooden shelves and spent much of his time tapping away on his computer, composing lengthy missives that would be delivered by courier to key lieutenants.

Osama’s Eldest Wife Khairiah Responsible for His Death

Osama Bin Laden, physically and mentally frail and holed-up in a secret compound in a Pakistan garrison town, may have been sold out to the Americans by his eldest wife who was furiously jealous of the al-Qa’ida leader’s preference for a younger bride.

An eight-month investigation carried out by a retired senior Pakistani army officer, Brig. Shaukat Qadir, suggests Bin Laden’s eldest wife, Khairiah Saber, was so upset that after she moved into the house in February 2011 that she collaborated with the CIA teams that were hunting him. “Absolutely, I’m sure about it,” said Mr Qadir, speaking yesterday fromRawalpindi. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

The retired officer has based his investigation on interviews with officials from the ISI agency and access to transcripts of interviews with Bin Laden’s three wives who were living with him in the Abbottabad house. The widows remain in Pakistani custody and who have this week been charged with visa offences.

Mr Qadir was also permitted rare access inside the compound, where he was shown blood-stains purportedly belonging to Bin Laden, who was shot dead byUSspecial forces. He said the motivation to invest his own money and time in the issue was the number of contradictions that appeared in the various accounts of the CIA’s surveillance operation and the eventual raid to kill Bin Laden, who was codenamed Geronimo.

In the aftermath of theUSraid onPakistanterritory, Mr Qadir said that along with many of his countrymen, he felt “ashamed”. In addition to completing and circulating his 64-page report, he has given evidence to the official government inquiry looking into the affair.

Several of Mr Qadir’s suggestions seem fanciful. He says, for instance, that Bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, may also have tried to give up the location of the al-Qa’ida leader. He cites as supporting evidence his belief that neither the courier nor his brother, picked up their automatic weapons to defend Bin Laden when American troops stormed the building. Other conclusions, such as Bin Laden’s break with his former deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri fit with what other analysts believe.

If correct, Mr Qadir’s account also provides new detail about the way Bin Laden made his way to Abbottabad from South Waziristan, via Swat and Haripur, arriving at the compound in the Bilal Town neighbourhood in the spring of 2005. He reveals that Pakistani officials found supplies of imported food, including dates, in the house. He makes no conclusions about whom, if anyone, within the Pakistani establishment was aware of his whereabouts.

Yet it is the detail about the domestic discord within Bin Laden’s home that will catch the eye of many. While Bin Laden lived on the third floor of the property with his youngest wife, Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada, a Yemeni who was 19 when they married in 1999, another wife, Siham Saber, lived in another room on the same floor.

That arrangement seems to work until the arrival of his eldest wife, Saudi-born Khairiah Saber, in early 2011. She had long been jealous of the youngest wife, said Mr Qadir, and was a fierce character. In his account, the retired officer quotes an ISI interrogator who questioned the eldest wife, saying: “She is so aggressive that she borders on being intimidating. Short of torturing her, we cannot get her to admit to anything. And, we will not torture women or children.”

Bin Laden, who was 54, had two marriages before he married Khairiah Saber. Both ended in divorce. He has more than 20 children with his various wives. One of his sons Khalid, was shot dead the Abbottabad compound, which the authorities knocked-down last month. Officials, deeply embarrassed about the entire affair, said it had been done to prevent it becoming a shrine.

Was Osama a Porno Fan?

The enormous cache of computer files taken from Osama’s compound contained a considerable quantity of pornographic videos, American officials said, adding a discordant note to the public image of the Islamist militant who long denounced the West for its lax sexual mores.

The officials would not say whether there was evidence that Osama or the other men living in the house had acquired or viewed the material.

The discovery of the pornography, first reported by Reuters, may not be surprising in a collection of five computers, 10 hard drives and dozens of thumb drives and CDs whose age and past ownership is not known.

But the disclosure could fuel accusations of hypocrisy against the founder of Al Qaeda, who was 54 and lived with three wives at the time of his death, and will be welcomed by counterterrorism officials because it could tarnish his legacy and erode the appeal of his brand of religious extremism.

In a 2002 “letter to the American people,” Osama denounced American culture for its exploitation of women’s bodies in dress, advertising and popular culture.

“Your nation exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools, calling upon customers to purchase them,” he wrote. “You plaster your naked daughters across billboards in order to sell a product without any shame. You have brainwashed your daughters into believing they are liberated by wearing revealing clothes, yet in reality all they have liberated is your sexual desire.”

A team of intelligence analysts under the CIA’s direction has been working to review the material seized from Osama’s house in Abbottabad, by the Navy Seal team that killed him. Officials have said the material shows that Osama was making notes about new ways to attack the United Statesand sending instructions by courier to subordinates and Qaeda affiliates.

But the Obama administration also released unflattering video footage of a gray-bearded Osama, wearing a cloak and a ski cap and clutching a remote control while watching his own statements on television. The suggestion that he must have dyed his beard for video recordings and was intensely concerned with his image could erode his reputation in the Muslim world as a charismatic and selfless leader.

Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, confirmed that American interrogators had questioned Osama’s three wives for the first time on May 12, 10 days after they were taken from the compound by Pakistani security forces. He declined to give more details, saying, “I can’t characterize the interaction.”

The three widows, Khairiah Sabar, Siham Sabar and Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, who is also known as Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, had been held and questioned for days by Pakistani officials before the C.I.A. interrogators spoke to them. Ms. Abdulfattah, who is Yemeni, was shot in the leg during the assault on Osama’s compound by Navy Seal commandos.

American officials have many urgent questions for them: where other top Qaeda operatives are, where Osama lived before moving to Abbottabad and whether any Pakistani military or intelligence officers visited the compound. But the wives are believed to have lived cloistered lives, and it is unclear what they may know or be willing to tell.

How Did the Americans Find Osama?

For years, the agonizing search for Osama Bin Laden kept coming up empty. Then last July, Pakistanis working for the CIA drove up behind a white Suzuki navigating the bustling streets nearPeshawar, and wrote down the car’s license plate.

The man in the car was Osama’s most trusted courier, and over the next month CIA operatives would track him throughout centralPakistan. Ultimately, administration officials said, he led them to a sprawling compound at the end of a long dirt road and surrounded by tall security fences in a wealthy hamlet 35 miles fromIslamabad.

On a moonless night eight months later, 79 American commandos in four helicopters descended on the compound. Shots rang out. A helicopter stalled and would not take off. Pakistani authorities, kept in the dark by their allies in Washington, scrambled forces as the American commandos rushed to finish their mission and leave before a confrontation. Of the five dead, one was a tall, bearded man with a bloodied face and a bullet in his head. A member of the Navy Seals snapped his picture with a camera and uploaded it to analysts who fed it into a facial recognition program.

And just like that, history’s most expansive, expensive and exasperating manhunt was over. The inert frame ofOsama,America’s enemy No. 1, was placed in a helicopter for burial at sea, never to be seen or feared again. A nation that spent a decade tormented by its failure to catch the man responsible for nearly 3,000 fiery deaths in New York, outside Washington and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, at long last had its sense of finality, at least in this one difficult chapter.

The raid was the culmination of years of painstaking intelligence work, including the interrogation of CIA detainees in secret prisons inEastern Europe, where sometimes what was not said was as useful as what was. Intelligence agencies eavesdropped on telephone calls and e-mails of the courier’s Arab family in a Persian Gulf state and pored over satellite images of the compound in Abbottabad to determine a “pattern of life” that might decide whether the operation would be worth the risk.

As more than a dozen White House, intelligence and Pentagon officials described the operation, the past few weeks were a nerve-racking amalgamation of what-ifs and negative scenarios. “There wasn’t a meeting when someone didn’t mention ‘Black Hawk Down,’ ” a senior administration official said, referring to the disastrous 1993 battle in Somalia in which two American helicopters were shot down and some of their crew killed in action. The failed mission to rescue hostages inIranin 1980 also loomed large.

Administration officials split over whether to launch the operation, whether to wait and continue monitoring until they were more sure that Osama was really there, or whether to go for a less risky bombing assault. In the end, President Obama opted against a bombing that could do so much damage it might be uncertain whether Osama was really hit and chose to send in commandos. A “fight your way out” option was built into the plan, with two helicopters following the two main assault copters as backup in case of trouble.

On May 1 afternoon, as the helicopters raced over Pakistani territory, the president and his advisers gathered in the Situation Room of the White House to monitor the operation as it unfolded. Much of the time was spent in silence. Mr. Obama looked “stone faced,” one aide said. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. fingered his rosary beads. “The minutes passed like days,” recalled John O. Brennan, the White House counter terrorism chief.

The code name for Osama was “Geronimo.” The president and his advisers watched Leon E. Panetta, the CIA director, on a video screen, narrating from his agency’s headquarters across the Potomac River what was happening in farawayPakistan.

“They ’ve reached the target,” he said.

Minutes passed.

“We have a visual on Geronimo,” he said.

A few minutes later: “Geronimo EKIA.”

Enemy Killed In Action. There was silence in the Situation Room.

Finally, the president spoke up.

“We got him.”

Years before the Sept. 11 attacks transformed Osama into the world’s most feared terrorist, the CIA had begun compiling a detailed dossier about the major players inside his global terror network.

It wasn’t until after 2002, when the agency began rounding up Qaeda operatives — and subjecting them to hours of brutal interrogation sessions in secret overseas prisons — that they finally began filling in the gaps about the foot soldiers, couriers and money men Osama relied on.

Prisoners in American custody told stories of a trusted courier. When the Americans ran the man’s pseudonym past two top-level detainees — the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; and Al Qaeda’s operational chief, Abu Faraj al-Libi — the men claimed never to have heard his name. That raised suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees were lying and that the courier probably was an important figure.

As the hunt for Osama continued, the spy agency was being buffeted on other fronts: the botched intelligence assessments about weapons of mass destruction leading up to the Iraq War, and the intense criticism for using waterboarding and other extreme interrogation methods that critics said amounted to torture.

By 2005, many inside the CIA had reached the conclusion that the Osama hunt had grown cold, and the agency’s top clandestine officer ordered an overhaul of the agency’s counterterrorism operations. The result was Operation Cannonball, a bureaucratic reshuffling that placed more CIA case officers on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

With more agents in the field, the CIA finally got the courier’s family name. With that, they turned to one of their greatest investigative tools — the National Security Agency began intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the man’s family and anyone insidePakistan. From there they got his full name.

In July 2010, Pakistani agents working for the CIA spotted him driving his vehicle nearPeshawar. When, after weeks of surveillance, he drove to the sprawling compound in Abbottabad, American intelligence operatives felt they were onto something big, perhaps even Osama himself. It was hardly the spartan cave in the mountains that many had envisioned as his hiding place. Rather, it was a three-story house ringed by 12-foot-high concrete walls, topped with barbed wire and protected by two security fences. He was, said Mr. Brennan, the White House official, “hiding in plain sight.”

Back in Washington, Mr. Panetta met with Mr. Obama and his most senior national security aides, including Mr. Biden, Secretary of State  Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. The meeting was considered so secret that White House officials didn’t even list the topic in their alerts to each other.

That day, Mr. Panetta spoke at length about Osama and his presumed hiding place.

“It was electric,” an administration official who attended the meeting said. “For so long, we’d been trying to get a handle on this guy. And all of a sudden, it was like, wow, there he is.”

There was guesswork about whether Osama was indeed inside the house. What followed was weeks of tense meetings between Mr. Panetta and his subordinates about what to do next.

While Mr Panetta advocated an aggressive strategy to confirm Osama’s presence, some CIA clandestine officers worried that the most promising lead in years might be blown if bodyguards suspected the compound was being watched and spirited the Qaeda leader out of the area.

For weeks last fall, spy satellites took detailed photographs, and the N.S.A. worked to scoop up any communications coming from the house. It wasn’t easy: the compound had neither a phone line nor Internet access. Those inside were so concerned about security that they burned their trash rather than put it on the street for collection.

In February, Mr. Panetta called Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, commander of the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, to CIA headquarters inLangley,Va., to give him details about the compound and to begin planning a military strike.

Admiral McRaven, a veteran of the covert world who had written a book on American Special Operations, spent weeks working with the C.I.A. on the operation, and came up with three options: a helicopter assault using American commandos, a strike with B-2 bombers that would obliterate the compound, or a joint raid with Pakistani intelligence operatives who would be told about the mission hours before the launch.

On March 14, Mr. Panetta took the options to the White House. CIA officials had been taking satellite photos, establishing what Mr. Panetta described as the habits of people living at the compound. By now evidence was mounting that Osama was there.

The discussions about what to do took place as American relations with Pakistan were severely strained over the arrest of Raymond A. Davis, the C.I.A. contractor imprisoned for shooting two Pakistanis on a crowded street inLahorein January. Some of Mr. Obama’s top aides worried that any military assault to capture or kill Osama might provoke an angry response fromPakistan’s government, and that Mr. Davis could end up dead in his jail cell. Mr. Davis was ultimately released on March 16, giving a freer hand to his colleagues.

On March 22, the president asked his advisers their opinions on the options.

Mr Gates was skeptical about a helicopter assault, calling it risky, and instructed military officials to look into aerial bombardment using smart bombs. But a few days later, the officials returned with the news that it would take some 32 bombs of 2,000 pounds each. And how could the American officials be certain that they had killed Osama?

“It would have created a giant crater, and it wouldn’t have given us a body,” said one American intelligence official.

A helicopter assault emerged as the favored option. The Navy Seals team that would hit the ground began holding dry runs at training facilities on both American coasts, which were made up to resemble the compound. But they were not told who their target might be until later.

Last Thursday, the day after the president released his long-form birth certificate — such “silliness,” he told reporters, was distracting the country from more important things — Mr. Obama met again with his top national security officials.

Mr. Panetta told the group that the CIA had “red-teamed” the case — shared their intelligence with other analysts who weren’t involved to see if they agreed that Osama was probably in Abbottabad. They did. It was time to decide.

Around the table, the group went over and over the negative scenarios. There were long periods of silence, one aide said. And then, finally, Mr. Obama spoke: “I’m not going to tell you what my decision is now — I’m going to go back and think about it some more.” But he added, “I’m going to make a decision soon.”

Sixteen hours later, he had made up his mind. Early the next morning, four top aides were summoned to the White House Diplomatic Room. Before they could brief the president, he cut them off. “It’s a go,” he said. The earliest the operation could take place was Saturday, but officials cautioned that cloud cover in the area meant that Sunday was much more likely.

The next day, Mr. Obama took a break from rehearsing for the White House Correspondents Dinner that night to call Admiral McRaven, to wish him luck.

On Sunday, White House officials canceled all West Wing tours so unsuspecting tourists and visiting celebrities wouldn’t accidentally run into all the high-level national security officials holed up in the Situation Room all afternoon monitoring the feeds they were getting from Mr. Panetta. A staffer went to Costco and came back with a mix of provisions — turkey pita wraps, cold shrimp, potato chips, soda.

At 2:05 p.m., Mr. Panetta sketched out the operation to the group for a final time. Within an hour, the CIA director began his narration, via video from Langley. “They’ve crossed intoPakistan,” he said.

The commando team had raced into the Pakistani night from a base in Jalalabad, just across the border inAfghanistan. The goal was to get in and get out before Pakistani authorities detected the breach of their territory by what were to them unknown forces and reacted with possibly violent results.

InPakistan, it was just past midnight on Monday morning, and the Americans were counting on the element of surprise. As the first of the helicopters swooped in at low altitudes, neighbors heard a loud blast and gunshots. A woman who lives two miles away said she thought it was a terrorist attack on a Pakistani military installation. Her husband said no one had any clue Osama was hiding in the quiet, affluent area. “It’s the closest you can be toBritain,” he said of their neighborhood.

The Seal team stormed into the compound — the raid awakened the group inside, one American intelligence official said — and a firefight broke out. One man held an unidentified woman living there as a shield while firing at the Americans. Both were killed. Two more men died as well, and two women were wounded. American authorities later determined that one of the slain men was Osama’s son, Hamza, and the other two were the courier and his brother.

The commandos found Osama on the third floor, wearing the local loose-fitting tunic and pants known as a shalwar kameez, and officials said he resisted before he was shot above the left eye near the end of the 40-minute raid. The American government gave few details about his final moments. “Whether or not he got off any rounds, I frankly don’t know,” said Mr. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief. But a senior Pentagon official, briefing on the condition of anonymity, said it was clear Osama “was killed byU.S.bullets.”

American officials insisted they would have taken Osama into custody if he did not resist, although they considered that likelihood remote. “If we had the opportunity to take Osama alive, if he didn’t present any threat, the individuals involved were able and prepared to do that,” Mr. Brennan said.

One of Osama’s wives identified his body, American officials said. A picture taken by a Seals commando and processed through facial recognition software suggested a 95 percent certainty that it was Osama. Later, DNA tests comparing samples with relatives found a 99.9 percent match.

But the Americans faced other problems. One of their helicopters stalled and could not take off. Rather than let it fall into the wrong hands, the commandos moved the women and children to a secure area and blew up the malfunctioning helicopter.

By that point, though, the Pakistani military was scrambling forces in response to the incursion into Pakistani territory. “They had no idea about who might have been on there,” Mr. Brennan said. “Thankfully, there was no engagement with Pakistani forces.”

As they took off at 1:10 a.m. local time, taking a trove of documents and computer hard drives from the house, the Americans left behind the women and children. A Pakistani official said nine children, from 2 to 12 years old, are now in Pakistani custody.

The Obama administration had already determined it would follow Islamic tradition of burial within 24 hours to avoid offending devout Muslims, yet concluded Osama would have to be buried at sea, since no country would be willing to take the body. Moreover, they did not want to create a shrine for his followers.

So the Qaeda leader’s body was washed and placed in a white sheet in keeping with tradition.  On the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, it was placed in a weighted bag as an officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker.

The body then was placed on a prepared flat board and eased into the sea. Only a small group of people watching from one of the large elevator platforms that move aircraft up to the flight deck were witness to the end of America’s most wanted fugitive.

Why Didn’t the Americans Properly Bury Osama?

Among the ironies surrounding the discovery and death of Osama in Abbottabad, Pakistan is the location of his final resting place: according to reports, the arch-terrorist who we’ve imagined for years skulking in caves and stalking the arid, rugged badlands of the Af-Pak border is now sleeping with the fishes of the Arabian Sea.

U.S.officials claim they deposited Osama into the ocean in order to comply with the stipulation in Islamic tradition that the deceased must be conferred to his or her grave within 24 hours of death.

At a press conference in Washington, John Brennan, the White House’s top counterterrorism official, said the burial at sea was conducted “in strict conformance with Islamic law,” though he was somewhat imprecise about what clerical officials were in attendance. When asked about the treatment of Osama’s body during his briefing, Brennan first referred to the body’s “disposal,” before hastily correcting himself with the word “burial.”

Finding a country willing to accept the remains of the world’s most wanted terrorist would have been difficult,” a USofficial said. “So the USdecided to bury him at sea.” The burial reportedly took place from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson in the North Arabian sea.

Yet some Muslim groups have already come out in criticism of the burial, claiming, among other stipulations, that sea burials according to Islamic tradition only take place when the deceased in question perishes away from land — keeping the corpse aboard a vessel would place a decomposing, unsanitary body in proximity to other passengers. The Guardian quotes a number of Islamic religious jurists on the matter. One suggests that the body should be lowered in “a vessel of clay” so to protect it from being defiled by nibblers of the deep. Beyond stressing that the ceremony was conducted in proper respect to Islamic conventions, Brennan and other U.S.officials were utterly vague about how Osama was committed to the waves. One Baghdad preacher growls: “It is not acceptable and it is almost a crime to throw the body of a Muslim man into the sea. The body of Osama should have been handed over to his family to look for a country to bury him.”

It’s likely that American officials simply wanted an excuse to lose any trace of a man responsible for the worst, most traumatic assault on theU.S.sincePearl Harbor, and were keen to deny his remaining supporters the opportunity to rally around a potential martyr’s grave — radical propagandizing is probably trickier when it involves scuba gear.

There’s precedent for this. Following the “26/11″ attack on Mumbai’s ritziest neighborhood by Pakistani militants, the Indian metropolis’s chief Muslim clerics commanded that the bodies of the terrorists not be granted space in the city’s Muslim graveyards, nor that any imam preside over their last rites. Months after they were gunned down by Indian security forces, the unclaimed terrorist corpses still languished in a hospital morgue.

In 2006, when US aircraft successfully targeted Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then al-Qaeda’s most dangerous and bloody-minded operative in Iraq, his body was interred in an undisclosed location after the Jordanian government refused requests from the militant’s hometown to accept the body. Not dissimilar to the language invoked now, U.S.officials insisted that Zarqawi’s remains had been handed over to the “appropriate Government of Iraq officials and buried in accordance with Muslim customs and traditions.” Osama, at the time, lionized the fallen jihadist and mastermind of many suicide bomb attacks as a “martyr” and a “hero.”

Few are issuing such proclamation in his defense right now, and one suspects that discontent in the Muslim world over the means of his burial will not linger all that long. And, besides, for someone like Osama, it could have been much worse. Just ask the ghost of Benito Mussolini. After his defeat and execution at the end of World War II, U.S. officials walked off with chunks of his brain — as a souvenir.

Is Osama Bin Laden Dead?

By Arnaud Borchgrave

UPI Editor at Large

July 26, 2010 – The “Veterans Today” Network, a one-man show on the Internet created and run by Gordon Duff, a 100 percent disabled Marine Vietnam veteran, states flatly that 9/11 was a CIA/Mossad conspiracy and that Osama bin Laden wasn’t involved and died in 2001.

This can easily be dismissed as yet another example of deliberately
disseminated disinformation riddled with intentionally false or
inaccurate data designed to confuse the adversary. But some key
intelligence officials are taking bin Laden’s reported demise
seriously.

CIA Director Leon Panetta said in early July that the intelligence
agency hadn’t been able to positively confirm any specific information
on the uber-terrorist since “late 2001.” And all those audio and video
tapes broadcast by the Qatar-based Al Jazeera global television
network? Clever Israeli forgeries, says Duff.

Many other voices in cyberspace claim the bin Laden myth is kept
“alive” to justify the Afghan war and the global war on terror.

Angelo Codevilla, who teaches international relations at Boston
University, is a former U.S. intelligence officer who studied Soviet
disinformation techniques during the Cold War. He says a close
examination of all the alleged bin Laden tapes, including the videos,
have convinced him that Elvis Presley is more alive than Osama bin
Laden.

By all accounts from those who knew him prior to 9/11, bin Laden was a
deeply religious man and his early tapes after 9/11 were sprinkled
with references to God and the Prophet Muhammad. Not so the later
ones, which were subsequently analyzed by some experts who said they were professional forgeries.

The last time credible intercepts of bin Laden’s voice were made by
overhead satellites in early December 2001 as he was escaping through
the Tora Bora mountain range from Afghanistan to the sanctuary of
Pakistan’s tribal areas.

The late Ajmal Khattak, the head of the Khattak tribe, who had half a
million followers in the region, advised this reporter and his
Pakistani assistant Ammar Turabi, and our multilingual security, to
rent horses and proceed to an exit from Tora Bora in the Tirah Valley.
We got there Dec. 11. Local villagers told us bin Laden and some 50
fighters had emerged Dec. 9 and were met by a convoy of utility
vehicles that sped off in the direction Peshawar.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton evidently had more recent
intelligence on her last visit to Pakistan July 21. She said she
believes “elements” of the Pakistani government know bin Laden’s
whereabouts. Those with the knowledge, she added, are in the “bowels”
of the bureaucracy, not the “top levels of government.” She was
clearly referring to some members of Pakistan’s ISI.

Former ISI chief Gen. Hamid Gull is a personal friend of both bin
Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, and bin Laden’s no. 2, the
Egyptian doctor Adman al-Zawahiri. Gul is an advocate of Pakistan’s
politico-religious extremists and self-declared enemy of the United
States.

There are “retired” ISI officers who still see bin Laden as a hero of
the joint campaign against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the
1980s. Gul and his followers are also working to hasten an end to the
U.S. presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

For the now growing number who believes bin Laden is dead, there is
only one valid message from bin Laden. It was his open letter to the
“Pakistani people,” on Al Jazeera, dated Sept. 24, 2001, 13 days after
9/11, in which he said:

• “I have already stated that I was not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States.
• “Neither had I any knowledge of these attacks nor do I consider the killing of innocent women and children and other humans, as an appreciable act … Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent … people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle.
• “All that is going in Palestine … is sufficient to call the wrath
  of God upon the United States and Israel.”

Those who believe Osama Bin Laden is alive, and guilty of killing
almost 3,000, quote his 2004 talk in which he said he thought of
attacking U.S. skyscrapers when he saw Israeli aircraft bombing tower
blocks in Lebanon in 1982.

“God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the twin
towers,” he said then, “but after our patience ran out and we saw the
injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward
our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind.”

While Duff is mostly guff for those whose job is to keep tabs on all
the twists and turns since 9/11, there is also the post 9/11
generation that doesn’t read newspapers or weekly magazines and gets
its news fix online. The conspiracy theory coupled with disinformation
from all sides makes for more interesting reading. It also gives
youngsters a leg up on their “naive” elders.

Bin Laden was suffering from a kidney ailment and some experts say he
died Dec. 13, four days after his escape from Tora Bora. Videos since
then, neutral experts say, show bin Laden writing with his right hand
but he is well known as left-handed. They also detected differences in
the shape of the nose, skin color and speech.

Duff does commentary on his conspiracy theories for radio and TV news programs; his provocative articles are carried the world over and his Web site gets 22 million page hits a month. Some of his recent “Top 10 Stories of the Week”: “The CIA: Beyond Redemption and Should Be
Terminated”; “Does Event Honoring Israeli Spy Suggest Another Israeli
Operation?”; “Wikipedia Revisionism to Israeli Pressure Groups.”

Duff’s “Corporate Profile” says, “We are a full service Network of 63
Web sites that service the U.S. Military Veterans’ Community,” which
claims “over 310,000 plus unique visitors per month” and recently grew 39 percent in one month.

On the World Wide Web, there are no red lines between information,
misinformation and disinformation.

Are the US & Pakistan Closer to Hunting Down Osama?

The recent capture of Taliban military commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, as he was leaving a seminary in the Pakistani seaport of Karachi, may give investigators several leads in tracking down the fugitive al-Qaeda chief.

U.S. special representative Richard Holbrooke, in Islamabad on Feb 18, 20101 for talks with Pakistani generals and President Zardari, lauded the arrest of the Taliban commander as a “tremendous achievement for Pakistani intelligence and American collaboration.”

As the Taliban’s second in command — after spiritual leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, also in hiding — and its top war strategist, Baradar has firsthand knowledge of the links between the Taliban and al-Qaeda’s operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And Washington says he is willing to share his secrets with Pakistani and CIA interrogators. The New York Times, which broke the news of Baradar’s arrest, says he is providing a “wealth of information.”

On Feb 18, possibly acting on information provided to interrogators by Baradar, security forces arrested three suspected top al-Qaeda militants, who according to Pakistani intelligence sources quoted in the local press were in Karachi on a shopping trip for washing-machine timers and other parts for triggering bombs.

Most important among the trio of suspects was Ameer Mauawia, described by Pakistani intelligence officers as the commander of al-Qaeda’s foreign fighters on the Pakistani tribal lands along the Afghan border. Mauawia is said to be a trusted and longtime ally of bin Laden’s, whom he allegedly followed when bin Laden fled from Sudan in May 1996 to Afghanistan to set up his terrorist training camps.

The Pakistanis were anxious to catch Mauawia for other reasons too.

He was chief of operations for the Pakistani Taliban, which views Islamabad as great an enemy as the NATO troops in Afghanistan and has staged dozens of suicide bombings in major Pakistani cities and towns, killing hundreds. Pakistani security forces also arrested two senior Taliban commanders in charge of operations in the northern Afghan provinces of Kunduz and Baghlan. The Kunduz commander, Mullah Abdul Salam, was captured far from the Afghan border, in the central Punjabi town of Faisalabad. A missile fired on Feb 18 by a U.S. drone at a vehicle in Pakistan’s tribal territory killed Muhammad Haqqani, the younger brother of Sirajuddin, a pro-Taliban commander who masterminded the suicide bombing at a U.S. base in December that killed seven CIA agents.

If Mauawia is all he’s cracked up to be, his interrogation might allow bin Laden’s trackers to resume their hunt on a trail long gone cold. Every few months, an audiotape purported to be from bin Laden is released; the latest, on Jan. 10, praised Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the failed Christmas Day bomber, and ranted about global warming.

Bin Laden’s last confirmed presence was at the siege of Tora Bora, in eastern Afghanistan, in December 2001, when the al-Qaeda chief and dozens of his men bribed Afghan mercenaries hired by U.S. special forces to let them escape, probably into the Pakistani mountains directly across the border.

A Pakistani intelligence officer who was the main liaison with the Taliban before 9/11 said that he informed then President Musharraf that bin Laden, who was said to be gravely ill, most likely died several weeks after Tora Bora and was buried in a hastily dug, unmarked grave in the Ghazni Desert of eastern Afghanistan. “He was too sick to walk on his own two legs or even ride a horse. His men had to tie him to a donkey,” says Brigadier Amir Sultan Tarar, better known to his Taliban confederates by his nom de guerre, Colonel Imam.

But a retired officer from the ISI isn’t so sure. “I personally haven’t met anyone who buried Osama,” he said. “It’s possible that he found his way to an urban area where he could have received treatment [bin Laden was said to be suffering from a kidney ailment]. But after word that he was crossing the Ghazni Desert, we never heard from him again. But if he is alive, I wish him long life.”

Since then a steady stream of voice recordings purportedly from bin Laden have surfaced, but very few videos. The last video was in September 2007, and showed him looking much the same as before 9/11, perhaps a bit more gaunt and with a whiter beard. The recordings could have been faked to inspire Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, but a jihadi source in Islamabad said that he heard from a trusted but secondhand source that bin Laden was alive as recently as two years ago.

“Since then,” he says, “nothing.” U.S. counterterrorism experts insist that even if bin Laden is alive, he is probably too deep in hiding to be anything other than a symbolic figurehead for al-Qaeda and the many jihadi groups it has spawned globally. Day-to-day management of the operation is said to be handled by his No. 2, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was nearly killed in a drone attack in the Pakistani tribal territory several years back. Nevertheless, the capture of top Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders in Karachi may help solve the mystery: Is bin Laden still alive, and if so, where is he hiding?

Osama is Bluffing Now

Osama bin Laden has claimed responsibility for the failed bombing of a Northwest airliner on Christmas. That’s not surprising, but what should be is that it took him nearly a month to do so.

Either it took all of that time for news of the plan to reach him, or he’s lying. And if he’s lying, we need to consider that the man is completely irrelevant. And why would bin Laden claim credit for a failed attack? The point of terrorism is to carry out your threats — that’s what terrifies people.

Take Lebanon’s Hizballah, an organization whose early days were steeped in terrorism: it made a point of never botching an attack, bombing or kidnapping. So when Hizballah said it was not going to stop until it drove the West out of Lebanon, that threat carried a lot of weight. And the credibility of Hizballah’s threat convinced U.S. President Ronald Reagan that Lebanon was lost, which prompted him to withdraw the Marines who were stationed there. In the Middle East, this is not stale history; and it’s a history that bin Laden certainly hasn’t forgotten.

The last major successful attack laid at the doorstep of al-Qaeda occurred nearly five years ago — the 2005 bombings on London’s mass-transit system. But even in that instance, no one is certain that al-Qaeda was behind it. All we know is that the plot was somehow hatched in Pakistan, but the identity of the mastermind remains a matter of conjecture. Al-Qaeda certainly never provided proof that it had either foreknowledge or control of the attack. The same is true for the Northwest Airlines bombing attempt: there’s not a shred of evidence that bin Laden’s al-Qaeda had anything to do with it. And the fact that bin Laden in his statement provided no inside detail of the attack pretty much says he wasn’t involved.

The Northwest attempt was homegrown, the would-be suicide bomber recruited in either Nigeria or Britain, the explosive device made in Yemen. His handlers call themselves al-Qaeda in Yemen, but there’s no evidence that this group takes orders from the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan’s tribal belt.

Bin Laden’s example may have been an inspiration for the Northwest attempt, but so what? If he didn’t exist, there would be any number of historical figures who could be held up as inspiration, from the Prophet Muhammad to the four caliphs that followed him. It’s little different from the extremists at Waco, Texas, who claimed their lunacy was inspired by Jesus Christ.

None of this is to say homegrown terrorism isn’t a danger. Take, for instance, the firing device that nearly brought the Northwest plane down. It was a chemical initiator, four common chemicals that progressively speed up the detonation.

Any competent chemist can build one. Only small quantities of the chemicals are needed, and they can be easily smuggled through airport security. As for the explosive used in the Christmas attempt, PETN, it’s everywhere and difficult to detect with the current airport-security systems.

The Christmas Day bombing attempt tells us that anybody, anywhere can wage war on the U.S., with or without promoting or invoking bin Laden’s name. But with each failure of al-Qaeda’s, and with the mess al-Qaeda has left in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it should be clearer to the world that it’s time to get over bin Laden and start dealing with more serious problems.

Why Doesnt Osama Attack Sweden?

The international strategy for eliminating terrorism has failed.

That is the lesson of the Christmas Day pantsbomber incident. It is the lesson of Afghanistan and Somalia. It threatens to become the lesson of Yemen.

A new strategy is needed.

The failed strategy is based on two principles:

Hunt down the terrorists; protect the homeland.

It is classic military doctrine, articulated after 9/11 by former U.S. president George W. Bush as part of what he called his war on terror.

His successor, Barack Obama, has left this military emphasis fundamentally unaltered.

“We are at war,” Obama said in a televised address. “We are at war against Al Qaeda.”

And if we were engaged in a normal fight against a defined enemy, this strategy and these remarks would suffice. But we are not.

In this struggle, every military action by the West creates only more terrorists.

Bush’s invasion of Iraq led to Al Qaeda terrorists establishing themselves there. His proxy war (carried out by Ethiopia) against the Islamists of Somalia created an even fiercer Islamist insurgency.

The West’s war against the Taliban of Afghanistan created the Taliban of Pakistan.

Along the way, these wars also led a small group of Britons to bomb the London underground and at least one confessed Canadian terrorist to plan attacks in Toronto.

Now Obama is under pressure to expand the war more forcefully into Yemen, the country where alleged Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is said to have been trained. If this happens, the precedents are ominous.

On the home front, defensive measures have almost certainly prevented a repeat of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. In that sense, they have worked.

But the case of Abdulmutallab, who allegedly tried to blow up a Detroit-bound jet with explosives hidden in his underwear, illustrates the limitations of that approach.

Indeed, every new air travel restriction creates new opportunities for those determined to terrorize.

When airport security banned box cutters, the terrorists tried explosive-laden shoes. When that was met with a requirement that passengers remove their footwear, the terrorists developed a scheme to mix carry-on explosive liquids. When shampoo bottles were banned from flights, they conceived the underwear bomb.

In August, one terrorist hid explosives in his rectum in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate a Saudi prince.
What’s next? The toupee bomb? Will terrorists take a lesson from drug smugglers and swallow explosive-filled condoms? Will airline passengers be forced to endure colonoscopies or MRIs before boarding a flight?

To raise these questions is to acknowledge the terrorists’ achievement. Even their failures succeed, in that every attempt results in more expensive and intrusive countermeasures by the state as well as more fear on the part of Western populations.
For remember: The aim of terrorists is to terrify. Fear of death is more effective than death itself.

An effective anti-terror strategy would be based on four principles.

First, terrorism itself must be demystified. It is not new. It is not unique to Islam, nor is it necessarily an existential threat. It is simply a very old tactic – stretching back to the Zealots of ancient Judea who assassinated both Roman occupation forces and suspected Jewish collaborators.

These days, terrorism is associated with so-called non-state actors like Al Qaeda. But historically, most terror has been committed by states: The Romans themselves in Judea; the French revolutionaries who used the guillotine to remove rivals; the Soviet authorities who set secret police against their own citizens, the Argentine generals of the 1970s intent on “disappearing” their political opponents.

In most cases, state terrorism is harder to combat then its non-state counterpart.

Which brings us to the second principle of an effective anti-terror strategy: Terrorists are not nuts. Sadly, most are all too sane.
To disparage terrorists as freedom-haters and cowards is neither helpful nor accurate. As Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden pointed out in 2004, if he truly hated freedom, he would attack Sweden. But he does not. Instead, he attacks the U.S. – not because American women wear short skirts but because he has a beef against Washington’s actions in the Arabian peninsula.

That’s why it is important to grapple with the causes of terrorism, with the nature of these beefs. That doesn’t necessarily mean acquiescing to the terrorists’ demands.

But it does mean understanding what they are. And in some cases it may mean striking deals.

This leads to a third principle: In most cases, the solutions to terror are political rather than military.

In 1930s and `40s, Britain fought a fierce campaign against Zionist terrorists in Palestine before, finally, agreeing to a Jewish state.
In the 1950s, the British fought an equally bitter battle against Mau Mau terrorists in colonial east Africa. Yet, in the end, they released alleged Mau Mau leader Jomo Kenyatta so that he could become the first prime minister of a newly independent Kenya.

More recently, and after years of inconclusive military action, Britain successfully defanged the terrorist Irish Republican Army by reaching a political settlement with its murderous leaders.
The final principle? Remember that terrorism is theatre.. More North Americans die in road accidents each year than from terrorist attacks. Yet terrorists seem far scarier than cars
If terrorism is theatre, then anti-terrorism must be as well. A just solution to the dispute between Israel and Palestine would not satisfy Bin Laden, whose aims are more grandiose. But it would speak volumes to those tempted to support him.

Obama, a master showman in his own right, instinctively understands this. That’s why his June 5 Cairo speech to the Muslim world, in which he spoke of “the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own,” was initially so successful.

But his failure to follow through has left a sour taste in the mouths of those he hoped to influence. That’s bad theatre and, as far as anti-terrorism goes, bad strategy.

by Thomas Walkom

 

 

What Osama’s 4th Son out of 20 Thinks of His Father

For Omar Bin Laden, the fourth eldest of Osama bin Laden’s 20 known children, the awful realization that his own father was a terrorist mastermind plotting a global conspiracy that would destroy the lives of thousands of innocent people and even his own family came gradually.

Of course, there were warning signs: Omar’s childhood was marked by regular beatings and survivalist training; there was the growing army of ruffians and retainers who called his father “Prince”; and then there was that Afghan mullah who had given his father an entire mountain in Tora Bora.

But as he recounts in a book co-written with his mother, Omar — now 28 years old — found it hard to give up hope that a man who had killed so many people might one day turn his back on violence and become a normal father.

The younger bin Laden fled Afghanistan only when it become clear that Osama was planning a massive attack on the United States; but he still couldn’t accept that his father was responsible for 9/11 until months later when he heard the familiar voice on audiotape claiming credit for the attacks. “That was the moment to set aside the dream I had indulged, feverishly hoping the world was wrong and it was not my father who brought about that horrible day,” he writes. “This knowledge drives me into the blackest hole.”

As the first book written about Osama bin Laden with help from anyone in the bin Laden family, Growing Up bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World (St. Martin’s Press) is a valuable — if limited — glimpse into the personal life of the world’s most wanted man. In recollections from Omar and his mother, Najwa bin Laden (the first of Osama’s five known wives), and with the assistance of American author Jean Sasson, the book paints a picture of Osama as a towering figure whose noble demeanor inspired fierce loyalty, but also an absolute authoritarian who wanted as many wives and children as possible in order to have foot soldiers for Islamic jihad. “My sons, your limbs must react to my thinking as though my brain was in your head,” he told his children when they complained about their life in al-Qaeda camps.

However, Osama the father remains almost as elusive to his son (and the reader) as he is to the FBI — too consumed by jihad to care much for his children, too distant to seem like a full person. But Omar’s memoir itself — which forms the core of the book — presents a strange and fascinating coming-of-age-story about a young boy groomed by his father to take over a worldwide terrorist enterprise who chooses instead to get a job, start a family, and play with animals. If the book suffers somewhat from the limitations of translation and overly formal prose, the thrill of being a fly on the wall of the bin Laden family drama quickly takes over.

Omar’s early childhood is both charmed and abusive. Though the family inhabited a mansion in the Saudi city of Jeddah and owned horse ranches in the desert, their father refused to let them have toys, take modern medicine, or use almost any modern conveniences except for light bulbs, automobiles and firearms. Though Osama would punish his boys for laughing or smiling and send them on forced marches in the desert without water, Omar and his brothers could at least console themselves with the honor of being sons of the man who helped defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, a hero in both the Muslim world and the West. “When I was a young boy I worshipped my father, whom I believed to be not only the most brilliant but also the tallest man in the world,” Omar writes. “I would have to go to Afghanistan to meet a man taller than my father. In truth, I would have to go to Afghanistan to truly come to know my father.”

The nightmare began in earnest after the Saudi government banished Osama from the Kingdom for railing against Riyadh’s decision to allow American soldiers on Saudi soil to repel Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. From the new family home in Sudan, while Osama plotted to overthrow the Saudi monarchy and the American government, Omar noticed some dangerous new arrivals in their Khartoum neighborhood, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of an Egyptian Islamist movement who becomes al-Qaeda’s second in command. When members of another extremist group raped one of Omar’s male friends, al-Zawahiri took justice into his own hands — by executing the victim.

On Christmas eve 2009, one of  Osama’s daughter, Eman, 17, took refuge in the Saudi Embassy in Tehran after eluding guards who have held her and five siblings under house arrest for eight years.

It has long been believed that Iran has held in custody a number of Osama’s children since they fled Afghanistan following the US-led invasion of that country in 2001 — most notably Saad and Hamza bin Laden, who are thought to have held positions in Al Qaeda.

Sister Eman told relatives in a call from the embassy that 29-year-old Saad and four other brothers were still being held in Iran.

Britain’s the Times reported that one of Osama’s wives and their 11 grandchildren were also living in Iran.

Osama’s another son, Abdullah, who lives in Saudi Arabia, told the Al Jazeera TV that Eman telephoned him after she eluded guards who were taking her on a shopping trip in Tehran.

Osama reportedly has 19 children by several wives. He took at least one of his wives and their children with him to Afghanistan in the late 1990s after he was thrown out of his previous refuge, Sudan. They fled when the US-led war erupted.

Omar said the family had not known for certain the fate of the siblings that fled through Iran until Eman’s escape. ‘Until four weeks ago, we did not know where they were,’ said the 28-year-old Omar, who is married to a British woman and has lived in Egypt and the Gulf. He said eight of Osama’s children lived in Saudi Arabia and Syria.

Most of Osama’s children, like Omar, live as legitimate businessmen. The extended Bin Laden family, one of the wealthiest in Saudi Arabia, disowned Osama in 1994 when Saudi Arabia stripped him of his citizenship because of his militant activities.

Osama’s billionaire father Mohammed, who died in 1967, had more than 50 children and founded the Bin Laden Group, a construction conglomerate that gets many major building contracts in the kingdom.

Omar said he spoke by telephone in recent weeks to his 25-year-old brother Othman, who is among the six siblings being held in Iran. Othman told them that Iranian authorities detained the group after they crossed the border from Afghanistan in 2001, and since have been holding them under guard in a housing complex in Tehran, Omar told Asharq Al Awsat.

Omar identified siblings in Iran as Saad, Hamza, Othman, Bakr, Fatima and Eman.

The Times quoted Omar as saying that his brothers and sisters told him how they had fled Afghanistan and walked to the Iranian border. They were taken to a walled compound outside Tehran where guards said they were not allowed to leave ‘for their own safety’.

Omar said his relatives lived as normal a life as possible, cooking meals, watching television and reading. They were allowed out only rarely for shopping trips.

As a number of families are being held in the compound some of the older siblings have been able to marry and have their own children.

‘The Iranian government did not know what to do with this large group of people that nobody else wanted, so they just kept them safe. For that we owe them much gratitude, and thank Iran from the depth of our heart,’ he said.

Omar hopes that the family will be given permission to leave Iran and join his mother, brother and two sisters in Syria, or himself and his wife in Qatar