But who would believe the American post-mortem smear campaign and character assassination. We have also heard of Saddam WMD and his mass graves. It is the production of discredited CIA dirty work squads. How about trying to smear Ahmedinejad by showing him with unclothed Persian women? Arabs are more sophisticated and highly-politiciesd than the ignorant American Zombies.
Obama has spoiled US victory by dumping Bin Laden's corpse in the Arabian Sea. While the courage of the Navy Seals was clearly 'demonstrated' when they killed unnarmed Bin Laden in front of his children. It is a disgrace for Superpower America that wants to present itself to the world as a Just, Free and Democratic country, to kill unarmed person without trial no matter what crime (s) that person may have committed. Only an idiot or a Zombie can believe or trust the uncivilised American cowboys infesting Washington D.C. Didn't the civilised world put Nazi Generals on trials for killing 40 million people? Or that was before the days of the 'brave' Navy Seals. The Iraqis, who suffered so much at the hands of the Americans, went to teach them lessons they will never forget. The Iraqis have practically put America on its knees.
Che Guevara, an Argentinean-born revolutionary was killed by a CIA assassination squad in Bolivia on October 9,1967 at the age of 39 . Until today, Che T-Shirts are worn throughout the world including inside the USA, the country that assassinated him. Che Guevara, left his Medical school and the comfort of his middle-class living and went to defend the exploited Latin American workers and to fight CIA-installed despots at the service of American corporations.
Bin Laden to a certain extent reminds many of Che Guevara. With a university degree in civil engineering and with millions inherited from his billionaire father, Bin Laden volunteered to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. That is why he was initially a hero to the Americans and to their Saudi friends who went to spend huge sums of money on training and arming the Mujahideen.
This feeling had later changed following the defeat of the Russians, and especially when Bin Laden started to oppose US-supported Israeli atrocities against Arabs. Which was the reason for Bin Laden attacks the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon for respectively, financing and arming Israel.
Similarly, Castro revolution against Batista was also popular in America as many children toys sold in the US at the time wore beards, hats and guns. This was changed when Castro was able to topple CIA-and Mafia-supported Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959.
The ideas of Che Guevara found fertile grounds in Latin America despite CIA assassinations and conspiracies.
Although Al-Qaeda has been sidelined by the on-going Arab revolutions, Bin Laden and his team must be given some credits for undermining and exposing the Pro-USraeli Arab dictators.
Many believe that Bin Laden assassination on May 1st, 2011 may work as a vital injection in the ailing body of Al-Qaeda.
Who may succeed Bin Laden as the leader of Al-Qaeda? Since the financial aids to Al-Qaeda are coming mainly from the Pro-USraeli Arab kings, Sheikhs, Emirs and Sultans, one must expect a citizen from one of these countries to be the new Al-Qaeda chief
The "Pigs of the Arab Gulf (Sultans, Emirs, Sheikhs and Kings)" were paying Al-Qaeda in order to keep them away. That is why no attacks took place in any of their countries.
Successive American governments continue to extort protection money from a large number of Arab governments in the form of huge military contracts and investment in US firms. As an example, the CIA protects the Saudi Royal family from potential terrorists or from political opposition in exchange for fat miltary contracts involving the sale of useless equipment and machindnes.
"That is not enough", Zombie preacher. The Americans can't police or control the Internet-connected world any more without burning their fingers and emptying their pockets. Had anyone imagined that disarmed Iraq will bankrupt America and its allies? After Iraq, no-one is afraid of the uncivilised American savages or their mercenaries killing people in the name of democracy and freedom. The Americans are currently fighting Jewish wars against Arabs and Muslims and I doubt very much they will ever win. In the process, the US will go bankrupt and the image and interests of their European allies will be severely damaged. The young Arabs are rebelling against the aging and prostrated pro-USraeli Arab leaderships. It is irresponsible for the Americans to continue their current anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim policies.
Adnan Darwash, Iraq Occupation Times
================
Al Qaeda leader Bin Laden dead - TV networks
02 May 2011 02:47
Source: reuters // Reuters
WASHINGTON, May 1 (Reuters) - Al Qaeda's elusive leader Osama bin Laden is dead and his body has been recovered by U.S. authorities, CNN reported on Sunday night. U.S. President Barack Obama was to make the announcement shortly.
(Washington news room; editing by Philip Barbara)
==
Osama bin Laden dead, say US officials: Live updates
By Atika Rehman
Published: May 2, 2011
Laden is dead and his body has been recovered by US authorities, US officials said. PHOTO: REUTERS/FILE
WASHINGTON: Osama bin Laden is dead and his body has been recovered by US authorities, US officials said on Sunday night.
US President Barack Obama was to make the announcement shortly that after searching in vain for bin Laden since he disappeared in Afghanistan in late 2001, the Saudi-born extremist is dead.
9:20 am
CNN reports that US diplomatic facilities are on high alert.
Twitter update:
HumaImtiaz Debating whether to go to White House or bar.
jehan_ara More & more I realize that it is not just Pakistani media that over-analyze, exaggerate, sensationalize and assume. Irresponsible behaviour.
abidhussayn “I am in Peru right now, I dont care.” – a friend answers when i asked if she is aware that Osama died.
9:10 am
Al Jazeera correspondent
9:00 am
Former American presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush welcome news of bin Laden’s death.
Twitter buzz:
sharmeenochinoy So did we help or did we just get a phone call saying dude he’s dead ao u better act like were in on it? #OsamaBinLaden #Pakistan
GhostOsama Did I mention that I have 72 virgins?
majorlyprofound The world must be thankful that Osama Bin Laden was in Pakistan. Would you rather have Osama Bin Laden living in your country hain?
NaheedMustafa Everyone’s becoming an expert on Abbotabad. It’s just a regular ol’ place people. Lots of military, lots of regular folk. Rich and poor.
discomaulvi “The United States is not, and never will be, at war with #Islam” – President Obama « Actions speak louder than words #BinLaden
8:51 am
Al Jazeera correspondent says operation took place near Abbottabad and that helicopters circled the compound where bin Laden was reportedly hiding.
8:50 am
A senior Pakistani intelligence official confirmed on Monday that Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks, had been killed. “Yes, I can confirm that,” he said, but declined to give further details, according to Reuters.
8:45 am
Obama says US cooperation with Pakistan helped track bin Laden down and that he has called president Zardari.
Both presidents agree that this is a good and historic day in both their histories.
Twitter buzz:
mirza9 The Indian press will have nothing to talk about if, as is most likely, the Pakistanis were instrumental in catching/killing Osama bin Laden
Nadir_Hassan Obama mentions Pakistan cooperation. That’s good
NickKristof Obama says troops engaged in firefight today on Osama compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, recovered his body.
cyalm Oh hell, they were tracking him in Pak since last Aug
sohaibgulbadan Wow, what a coincidence that OBL’s death came two months before the start of the July 2011 Afghanistan withdrawal deadline.
8:40 am
Obama says he received tip off that bin Laden was hiding
in a compound deep inside Pakistan.
8:35 am
Obama addresses the world, confirms the death of bin Laden due to an operation conducted by the US.
8:30 am
CNN reports that bin Laden was killed by the US in a mansion outside Islamabad.
Cheering crowds have gathered outside the White House celebrating the news.
===
Al Qaeda central: All roads lead to Karachi
By Saba Imtiaz
Published: May 1, 2011
Al Qaeda chose Karachi as the workshop for its media and financial operations, strategic planning and hideout. PHOTO: FILE/AFP
KARACHI:
On September 11, 2001, four al Qaeda operatives in Karachi watched news footage of planes crashing into the World Trade Centre towers in New York. One of them was the man who had planned every detail of the attack.
They celebrated their success and prayed. The men they had financed and trained had pulled off an unprecedented coup.
But despite this major attack, they considered their work far from over. In the months to come, they would plot more attacks, train and finance young operatives, and help their peers in Afghanistan escape the US and coalition forces that were bombarding their hideouts.
Two years later, they would be in Guantanamo Bay, being interrogated by officials of the same country they had wreaked havoc on.
Guantanamo yielded assessments of over 700 detainees held there. These files were released this month by WikiLeaks and are astonishing in their breadth. The picture they paint sweeps over the mosques of Yemen, training camps in Muzaffarabad and Khost, airports in the Gulf and eventually coalesce to the city that became a nerve centre for al Qaeda: Karachi. This seething and heaving metropolis had always been a reliable base, given that it was a pit stop for those traveling to Afghanistan to join the Taliban and other militant organisations.
Al Qaeda chose Karachi as the workshop for its media and financial operations, strategic planning and it served as a reliable hideout for everyone from the 9/11 plotter Khalid Shaikh Mohammad to Osama bin Laden’s son. The files reveal the confessions by al Qaeda operatives — elicited using harsh interrogation techniques — and how hundreds of impressionable young men were swept away by the call to ‘jihad’.
It was in Karachi that al Qaeda celebrated its success, and it is where it eventually met its downfall. An operative’s driver gave away the locations to their safe houses after being arrested. Raids on houses revealed a trove of documentation about the hundreds of men who had enlisted with al Qaeda. Arrested operatives began talking about the plans they had started working on: targeting consulates, hotels and ports. But while those plots did not come to fruition, the wheels set in motion by al Qaeda are still running in Karachi.
Timeline of operatives arriving in Karachi
According to the assessments released by WikiLeaks, detainees at Guantanamo Bay mostly travelled to Karachi in 2000 and 2001. After 9/11, people, including from within Pakistan, were persuaded to join the fighting in Afghanistan after fiery speeches and sermons were delivered at political rallies and mosques. Others were persuaded, especially in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, to travel to Afghanistan via Karachi for charity work. For many, this was not their first time to the region – they had either participated in the fighting against the Soviet Union during the 1980s or had travelled to Afghanistan for charity work. The most common route was to Kandahar via Karachi and Quetta, which the US authorities used as an indicator to assess detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
Did you know…
* ISI officers visited Guantanamo Bay from Aug 3 to 10, 2002 to interrogate Pakistani detainees
* Al Qaeda military commander Sayf al Adl told Khalid Shaikh Mohammad to not murder Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, but to either hand him over to the groups who kidnapped him or release him
* Osama bin Laden’s son Saad bin Laden lived in Karachi with his wife from Jan to June 2002
* A Karachi-based al Qaeda member was tasked with procuring supplies and construction material from and sending them to Afghanistan to prepare the cave complex in Tora Bora for occupation by Osama bin Laden and his family
* A letter sent by Khalid Shaikh Mohammad to Hamza al Zubayr, instructing him to execute a terrorism plot, was dubbed the ‘Perfume Letter’
* Several detainees told US officials that they had visited or stayed at Karachi’s Makki Masjid. However, officials believed this was a ‘cover story’ to hide their actual travels
Profiles of detainees captured in Karachi
Ammar al Balochi
Nationality: Pakistani
Age: 34
Capture: April 2003
Internment at Guantanamo Bay: 4 years
Abd al Aziz Ali aka Ammar al Balochi is Khalid Shaikh Mohammad’s nephew and was married to Aafia Siddiqui. US Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced that al Balochi, along with Mohammad, will face trial by a military commission.
His mother has filed a case in the Sindh High Court over his enforced disappearance. Ammar al Balochi was captured in a raid in April 2003 and was handed over to the US. He studied at the Universal Computer Institute and Petroman Electronics Institute in Karachi from 1996 to 1998.
Ammar al Balochi was responsible for the ‘Karachi Plot’, which would target US consulates and troops in the city. He dealt with media operations and financial transactions, including picking up money from ‘couriers’ and transferring it abroad or within Pakistan. He helped facilitate the travel and funding of the 9/11 hijackers and was part of the planning team for key operations.
Walid Mohammad Salih bin Attash
Nationality: Yemeni
Age: 33
Capture: April 2003
Internment at Guantanamo Bay: 4 years
Walid Mohammad Salih bin Attash was captured in Karachi with Ammar al Balochi. He fought ‘jihad’ in Tajikistan and against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. He was part of the operational planning team for important plots and was also involved in planning the 2000 attack on the USS Cole.
Ramzi bin al Shibh
Nationality: Yemeni
Age: 38
Capture: September 2002
Internment at Guantanamo Bay: 4 years
Ramzi bin al Shibh was originally enlisted as a member of the 9/11 hijackers team, but since he had difficulties obtaining a US visa, he was made a coordinator for the attacks. Ramzi bin al Shibh is one of the 16 high-value detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay. Hijacker Mohammad Atta called him in August 2001 to tell him the date of the 9/11 attack through a riddle. Al Shibh informed Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, who told Osama bin Laden of the impending attack. He moved to Iran after 9/11 but had to leave because Iran was set to start arresting ‘mujahideen’ based there. He was working on a plot to attack Heathrow airport before he was arrested in the Sept 2002 raids on al Qaeda safe houses in Karachi.
Majid Khan
Majid Khan
Nationality: Pakistani
Age: 31
Capture: March 2003
Internment at Guantanamo Bay: 4 years
Majid Khan is one of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. He worked directly with Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, and was directly involved in the assassination plot against then head of state Pervez Musharraf. Khan acted as a courier to deliver funding to al Qaeda operatives in Thailand. Mohammad planned to use Majid Khan to carry out terrorist plots in the US, targeting gas stations. Khan was given what he believed was an explosives-laden waistcoat and was told to detonate it in a mosque which Musharraf was due to visit. This was a ‘test’ to vet Khan as a possible operative.
Karachi’s role
The assessments thus reveal Karachi’s integral role to al Qaeda operations. Mohammad had made the city his base and most key al Qaeda operatives lived in the numerous safe houses set up in the city. The assessments state that according to Israeli intelligence, Osama bin Laden gave Mohammad permission in 1999 to begin preparation for terrorist attacks. 9/11 was one such product.
Media cell The alleged plotter of the 9/11 attacks Khalid Shaikh Mohammad ran al Qaeda’s media cell in Karachi. Videos were delivered to Karachi. Ammar al Balochi used Karachi-based operatives to pass messages onto a group which ran a UK-based website sympathetic to al Qaeda. In early 2002, he used Saifullah Paracha’s company Universal Broadcasting to produce a video highlighting Bakr al Azdi’s experiences in Tora Bora. News was also forwarded on to al Qaeda safe houses in Afghanistan.
Financing Financing for al Qaeda operations flowed through Karachi, whether it was the delivery of money or transferring it abroad. Ammar al Balochi set up safe houses in Karachi and also arranged for financial transactions, such as sending thousands of dollars abroad or receiving money from ‘messengers’ who hand-delivered hundreds of thousands in rupees in cash. Money was also invested in a real estate project owned by Saifullah Paracha.
Accounting Al Qaeda had accounting offices in Peshawar and Karachi. Financial transactions were made through Karachi, including handing over money to ‘couriers’ who would then travel abroad with the money or deliver it within the country.
Bomb making Al Qaeda ran two workshops in the city which produced remote controlled firing devices (RCFDS) and timers for use in improvised explosive devices. The workshop began production in early 2002, and al Qaeda’s detained bomb maker told Guantanamo authorities that he Al-Qasim estimates the workshops had “produced between 400 to 500 RCFDS, 600 to 700 Casio timers and 600 to 700 integrated circuit timers.” Detonators were delivered to a man at a Quetta bus stop (the files are unclear if the bus stop is for Quetta-bound buses or not) and to Sabzi Mandi.
Money laundering To provide a cover for al Qaeda operations, dummy import-export businesses were to be set up with Saifullah Paracha’s assistance. An analyst noted that al Qaeda’s investment in real estate could be an attempt at money laundering.
Training The 9/11 operatives had worked with Mohammad in Karachi on the plot. Mohammad had also trained a team in English classes and American culture. Operatives were taught how to use the internet since e-mail was a safer mode of communication than phone calls. There were also plans to use a flying school in Karachi for future training. Walid Salih bin Attash and Ammar al Balochi, who were working on the Karachi Plot, had asked for 50 men to be ready to carry out operations.
Karachi also served as a useful ‘example’ for attacks. Planning for an attack on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz was done by studying Karachi’s port. Osama bin Laden, who financed the plot, instructed Abd el Rahim Hussein Mohammad al Nashiri to buy a fishing boat, learn Karachi’s boat registration process and study the port’s entry and exit procedures by using fishing expeditions as a cover.
Biological weapons plot Al Qaeda had also started planning for a biological weapons attack, including the use of anthrax. Crates of anthrax had earlier been moved from Karachi to Kandahar, signalling that al Qaeda was able to procure and store the material in the city. However, since al Qaeda’s leadership had to leave Afghanistan, they planned to shift operations to Karachi. MIT graduate Aafia Siddiqui, who was consulted on the project, reportedly said that she would participate in the plot if al Qaeda tasked her to.
Safe passage Al Qaeda arranged for its members to leave Afghanistan and travel to Karachi. Several were advised to leave to Iran but had to come back to Karachi when Iran began cracking down on operatives. Al Qaeda arranged for the housing and transport of families within the country as well.
Plots
Al Qaeda planned to assassinate then-head of state Pervez Musharraf.
Balochi and Attash planned to attack two hotels in Karachi that housed US troops on a regular basis, as well as the consulate. They were arrested the same day that they were due to receive explosives for the attack.
Housing
Gulshan-e-Iqbal: Al Qaeda managed several guesthouses and safe houses in Karachi. The first house, which was operational for the longest period, was in Gulshan-e-Iqbal
Gulistan-e-Jauhar: A safe house was located in the Rabia City complex
Tariq Road: The house was used as a planning cell
Defence: Safe houses were located in Defence Phase II and Defence View
Shahrae Faisal: A safe house is located near the Karachi airport. It was used to print news from online sources, which was forwarded to al Qaeda safehouses in Afghanistan
Saifullah Paracha, who had provided al Qaeda financial and material support, reportedly assisted Khalid Shaikh Mohammad in selecting houses in Karachi to be used as al Qaeda safe houses. According to his assessment document, “Paracha owned part of a 330-unit apartment complex called Cliftonia in Karachi. Ammar al Balochi invested EUR 240,000 in Paracha’s Cliftonia Apartment Complex.” Paracha noted that al Qaeda “was only interested in the ground floor units of the complex, as these were the only units that could be entered while avoiding the complex’s security personnel.”
The Al Qaeda life
Osama bin Laden’s son Saad bin Laden lived in Karachi with his wife and son from January to June 2002. Khalid Shaikh Mohammad provided Saad a ‘haven’. He would occasionally come with Mohammad to one of the safe houses located at D-255, Block 13-D/1, Gulshan-e-Iqbal. The house was also used by other al Qaeda operatives, including Walid Mohammad Salih bin Attash.
Many of the 9/11 hijackers stayed in the Rabia City complex. Muhammad Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Hani Hanjour stayed at the Defence View safe house.
The guesthouses also housed senior al Qaeda members, including Osama bin Laden’s security chief Hamza al Ghamdi, al Qaeda military operations supreme commander Muhammad Salah al-Din Abd al-Halim Zaydan aka Sayf al-Adil, USS COLE bombing mastermind Abd al-Rahim Hussayn Muhammad al-Nashiri and senior al-Qaeda operatives Walid Muhammad Salih Bin Attash, Ammar al Balochi and Khalid Shaikh Mohammad.
Hotels
Hotels identified by the US included the Dubai, Embassy, Emirates, Faran, Gulf, Mashriq and Mehran which were commonly used by al Qaeda members.
Mosques
Other indicators for assessing Guantanamo detainees included association or affiliation with the Makki Mosque (run by the Tablighi Jamaat) and the Abu Bakr International University. One detainee said he went to fight in Afghanistan after hearing Mufti Atique speak at the Siddiq-e-Akbar Mosque.
Offices
One detainee said he had visited the Taliban office in the old Expo Centre near the Mohammad Ali shrine
Hospital
Abdul Rahim Ghulam Rabbani stated that he was instructed to go to a hospital on Tariq Road to care for wounded al Qaeda memb
Raids timeline
Feb 7, 2002: The ISI, working with US officials, raid a safe house run by Abdu Ali Sharqawi. Sixteen people, including Sharqawi, are captured.
Impact: Two life vests containing traces of explosives are discovered.
March 2002: According to harpers.org, Pakistani authorities raid a residence believed to have been used as a safe house by Abu Zubaydah and take its residents into custody, including Salah Ahmed al Salami, who died in Guantanamo Bay.
June 2002: Sketches of US embassies in Kazakhstan are seized during a raid on a safe house in Karachi occupied by Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan-linked Uighurs. The sketches were reportedly to be used by senior al Qaeda member Mustafa.
Sept 9, 2002: Pakistani authorities raid several suspected al Qaeda residences in Karachi.
Sept 10, 2002: Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani and his driver Mohammad Madni are captured during an ISI raid on Rabbani’s house. Madni provides information on the location of other safe houses in Karachi. Three electronic detonators are found.
Sept 11, 2002: Three houses are raided. Ramzi bin al Shibh, Ahmed Rahim Ghulam Rabbani and Hassan Mohammad bin Ali Attash are arrested from a Tariq Road safe house.
Impact: Twenty individually wrapped passports, most of which are valid passports belonging to the wives and children of Osama bin Laden, are found stored next to remotely activated electronic detonators. The devices were built inside black Sega videogame cartridges and are designed for remote activation through the use of a cell phone.
Sept 11, 2002: Raids are conducted on two apartments in Karachi’s Defence Phase II commercial area, where eight heavily armed Arabs are living, including al Qaeda plotter Hamza Zubayr. A fire fight follows in which the residents throw four hand grenades and fire hundreds of rounds at the Pakistani forces. The residents hold knives to their throats and threaten to kill themselves rather than be taken into custody. Two men, including Zubayr, are killed. Captured are six men, who are given the pseudonym of ‘the Karachi Six’. Several Pakistani officials are injured. The standoff lasts about four hours before Pakistani officers are able to overpower them and take them into custody. Zubayr was reportedly running a cell at the house in preparation for terrorist attacks. Two handguns and three grenades are seized. A Kalashnikov rifle and a submachine gun used by the men are seized by police.
Planning: Plans for further al Qaeda operations stopped until Oct 2002
Data: Two lists containing hundreds of names, aliases and nationalities of al Qaeda operatives are found, which US authorities use to check the names of detainees against.
Trust accounts are also found, defined as “simple storage compartments such as envelopes or folders that were used to secure the individual’s personal valuables until completion of training or another activity. This document would have been transported from Afghanistan to Karachi for safe keeping following the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom.”
April 27 / April 30, 2003: The Intelligence Bureau and Rangers capture Ammar al Baluchi, Walid bin Attash and four suspected al Qaeda members.
Impact: 150kg of high explosives and detonators are seized during the raid.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 1st, 2011.
====
Old photo shows Bin Laden, Zawahiri and Muhammad Atef. PHOTO: AFP
While Express News reporters have been told by locals that they are upset at the new-found notoriety of Abbottabad, it has been home to at least one key operative in the past – al Qaeda operational chief Abu Faraj al Libbi.
Al Libbi was captured in Mardan in May 2005 by Pakistani forces and had a long-term association with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri.
According to his assessment file released by WikiLeaks, “In July 2003, detainee received a letter from Osama bin Laden’s designated courier, Maulawi Abd al Khaliq Jan, requesting detainee take on the responsibility of collecting donations, organizing travel, and distributing funds to families in Pakistan. Osama bin Laden stated detainee would be the official messenger between UBL and others in Pakistan. In mid-2003, Abu Faraj al Libbi moved his family to Abbottabad and worked between Abbottabad and Peshawar.” According to a transcript of his combatant status review tribunal hearing, he had travelled to Raiwind in 2003 to meet with representatives of Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin and Taliban officials. They discussed operations against the United States and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
Umar Patek, who was wanted in the 2002 bombings of nightclubs in Bali that killed over 200 people, was also arrested in Abbottabad, according to an Associated Press report. He had sought refuge there with a family.
According to the AP report, “officials did not say how or why Patek ended up there, but his arrest followed the detention of an alleged Al Qaeda facilitator in the town called Tahir Shehzad, who worked as a clerk at the town’s post office, a squat building just across the road from the British-era St Luke’s Church. Tahir had been under surveillance since last year when he was spotted in Abbottabad with an Arab terror suspect, said an intelligence official.”
Eight years later, Osama bin Laden was found living in the same area, a hilly resort popular with tourists from within Pakistan and a retirement spot for many.
According to Reuters, the location Osama bin Laden lived in was discovered in August 2010.
“When we saw the compound where the brothers lived, we were shocked by what we saw: an extraordinarily unique compound,” a senior administration official told Reuters.
“The bottom line of our collection and our analysis was that we had high confidence that the compound harboured a high-value terrorist target. The experts who worked this issue for years assessed that there was a strong probability that the terrorist who was hiding there was Osama bin Laden,” another administration official said.
The building, about eight times the size of other nearby houses, sat on a large plot of land that was relatively secluded when it was built in 2005. When it was constructed, it was on the outskirts of Abbotabad’s centre, at the end of a dirt road, but some other homes have been built nearby in the six years since it went up, officials said.
Intense security measures included 12- to 18-foot outer walls topped with barbed wire and internal walls that sectioned off different parts of the compound, officials said. Two security gates restricted access, and residents burned their trash, rather than leaving it for collection as did their neighbours, officials said.
Few windows of the three-story home faced the outside of the compound, and a terrace had a seven-foot privacy wall, officials said.
“It is also noteworthy that the property is valued at approximately $1 million but has no telephone or Internet service connected to it,” an administration official said. “The brothers had no explainable source of wealth.”
U.S. analysts realized that a third family lived there in addition to the two brothers, and the age and makeup of the third family matched those of the relatives – including his youngest wife – they believed would be living with Bin Laden.
“Everything we saw, the extremely elaborate operational security, the brothers’ background and their behaviour and the location of the compound itself was perfectly consistent with what our experts expected Bin Laden’s hide-out to look like,” another Obama administration official said.
A small US team conducted a helicopter raid on the compound on Sunday afternoon, officials said. After 40 minutes of fighting, Bin Laden and an adult son, one unidentified woman and two men – identified as the courier and his brother – were dead, officials said.
===
BREAKINGVIEWS-Osama bin Laden death shouldn't be a rallying call
02 May 2011 08:26
Source: reuters // Reuters
(Adds dropped word)
By Una Galani
DUBAI, May 2 (Reuters Breakingviews) - The Saudi-born militant certainly raised the global risk premium and imbalances over the last decade. But his death is largely a symbolic victory. The threat of al Qaeda in its various guises remains and the economic reverberations of the Arab spring may reach much further.
Full view will be published shortly.
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CONTEXT NEWS
-- Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed on May 1 in a firefight with U.S. forces in Pakistan, President Barack Obama said.
-- "Justice has been done," Obama said in a late-night White House speech announcing the death of the elusive mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people.
-- Obama said U.S. forces led a targeted operation that killed bin Laden in Abbotabad north of Islamabad. His body was recovered, he said. -- Reuters story: Osama bin Laden killed in shootout, Obama says [ID:nN02183671]
-- Reuters TAKE-A-LOOK [ID:nBINLADEN]
-- The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own --
-- For previous columns by the author, Reuters customers can click on [GALANI/]
(Editing by Robert Cole and David Evans)
====
FACTBOX-Who was Osama bin Laden?
02 May 2011 03:19
Source: reuters // Reuters
May 2 (Reuters) - Here are some key facts about Osama bin Laden, who U.S. officials said late on Sunday has been killed and his body recovered by U.S. Authorities. *
Bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia in 1957, one of more than 50 children of millionaire construction magnate Mohamed bin Laden.
His first marriage was to a Syrian cousin at the age of 17, and he is reported to have at least 23 children from at least five wives. * Convinced that Muslims are victims of U.S.-led terrorism, bin Laden is blamed for masterminding a series of attacks on U.S. targets in Africa and the Middle East in the 1990s. His family, which became rich from the Saudi construction boom, disowned him, and he was stripped of his Saudi citizenship.
* He fought in the U.S.-funded insurgency in the 1980s against Soviet troops in Afghanistan, where he founded al Qaeda. He returned to Afghanistan in the 1990s, training Islamist militants from across the world in camps allowed to function by the ruling Taliban.
* Tall, gaunt and bearded, bin Laden was unhurt by U.S. missile strikes on his Afghan camps after the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa. According to some reports, he was nearly killed by a U.S. bomb when militants were being hunted late in 2001 in the Tora Bora mountains in eastern Afghanistan.
* Bin Laden approved the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States in which nearly 3,000 people died, saying later that the results had exceeded his expectations. With a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head, he then evaded the world's biggest manhunt for a decade, with tens of thousands of U.S. and Pakistani troops looking for him. * Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in Dec. 2009 that the United States does not know where bin Laden has been hiding and has not had any good intelligence on his whereabouts in years.
* More than 60 messages have been broadcast by bin Laden, al Qaeda's number two Ayman al-Zawahri, and their allies since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. * In a Sept, 2007 video marking the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks bin Laden said the United States was vulnerable despite its economic and military power, but he made no specific threats. (Writing by Mark Trevelyan and David Cutler, London Editorial Reference Unit, Editing by William Maclean)
===
Pakistani hill town astonished by bin Laden's death
02 May 2011 13:01
Source: reuters // Reuters
By Kamran Haider
ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan, May 2 (Reuters) - Residents of the Pakistani town of Abbottabad were jolted from their sleep on Sunday night by the boom of explosions, unaware the hunt for the world's most wanted man was coming to a bloody end in their sleepy hills.
Helicopter-borne U.S. forces swooped on a compound on the edge of Abbottabad in the middle of the night and killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden who was hiding there, nine and a half years after he masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks. "We rushed to the rooftop and saw flames near that house. We also heard some gunshots," said Mohammad Idrees, who lives about 400 metres from the compound.
"Soon after the blast, we saw military vehicles rushing to the site."
Pakistani soldiers stopped reporters approaching the compound, which was surrounded by a fabric or canvas screen.
A helicopter covered by a tarpaulin sat in a nearby field, guarded by Pakistani soldiers. U.S. officials earlier said a U.S. helicopter was lost due to a mechanical problem during the operation but that its crew safely evacuated.
Bin Laden's residence, called a mansion by U.S. officials, stood fourth in a row of about a dozen houses. A satellite dish was perched on the roof of the house, which was surrounded by high walls.
Television pictures from inside the house showed blood stains smeared across a floor next to a bed.
Pakistani TV stations also showed a picture purportedly of bin Laden shot in the head, his mouth pulled back in a grimace. Reuters pictures editors determined the image was a fake after discovering a number of inconsistencies in the picture.
Another resident, Nasir Khan, said commandos had encircled the compound as three helicopters hovered overhead.
"All of a sudden there was firing towards the helicopters from the ground," said Khan, who watched the drama unfold from his roof.
"There was intense firing and then I saw one of the helicopters crash."
U.S. officials in Washington said a small U.S. team conducted a helicopter raid on the compound in Abbottabad, a military garrison town some 60 km (35 miles) north of the capital Islamabad. After 40 minutes of fighting, bin Laden and an adult son, one unidentified woman and two men were dead.
ASTOUNDED NEIGHBOURS
U.S. officials said security measures at the compound included outer walls up to 5.5 metres (18 feet) tall topped with barbed wire and internal walls that sectioned off different parts of the compound.
Residents said they were astounded to learn bin Laden had been in their midst. One neighbour said an old man had been living in the compound for the past 10 years.
"He never mixed much, he kept a low profile," said the neighbour, Zahoor Ahmed.
"It's hard to believe bin Laden was there. We never saw any extraordinary movements," said another neighbour, Adress Ahmed.
Abbottabad has long been a cool, leafy retreat from the heat of the Pakistan plains.
It was founded by a British army officer, James Abbott, in the mid-nineteenth century as the British were pushing the bounds of their Indian empire into the northwestern hills inhabited by Pashtun tribes.
Today, the town is home to a Pakistani military academy and its surrounding hills are dotted with summer homes.
Sohaib Athar, whose online profile says he is an IT consultant taking a break from the rat race, sent out a stream of live updates on Twitter about the movement of helicopters and blasts without realising it was a raid on bin Laden.
When he learnt who had been killed, he tweeted: "Uh oh, there goes the neighbourhood."
But it might take more to convince many people that bin Laden is dead.
One soldier on patrol near the compound said there had been talk before of bin Laden's death, only for it to be proven untrue.
"It's not clear if he was killed or not," the soldier said. (Writing by Robert Birsel, Editing by Dean Yates)
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BREAKINGVIEWS-Demise of bin Laden brings risks as well as relief
02 May 2011 13:00
Source: reuters // Reuters
-- The authors are Reuters Breakingviews columnists. The opinions expressed are their own --
By Ian Campbell and Una Galani
LONDON/DUBAI, May 2 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Osama bin Laden's death is an important landmark which leaves hope for the Arab spring intact. The initial, obvious, response is to expect celebratory gains and for global equities and commodity prices to advance. But while the medium-term outlook is undoubtedly improved -- for the United States and the rest of the world -- bin Laden's death may heighten investors' sense of risk in the near term, bolstering the dollar and curbing flows into speculative assets.
In recent weeks and months markets have been partying on something bin Laden himself might have welcomed: a plunging dollar. Traders have been shorting the greenback and going long a host of other assets, not least in emerging economies. Last week Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, fuelled this tendency by suggesting the Fed was in no hurry to raise its policy interest rate. U.S. dollar weakness has been a big factor in record prices for silver and gold and the highs for currencies such as the Australian and Singapore dollars. The euro is at $1.48, despite the great difficulties of the euro zone periphery.
Bin Laden's death doesn't change the broad market picture materially -- U.S. interest rates will remain very low -- but it may, at least temporarily, alter the market mood. It could make markets wary of reprisal attacks and of heightened risks in North Africa and the Islamic world. It is easy to overstate the al Qaeda influence on world finance, however. The risks posed have not helped world growth but the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the credit crunch, balanced by the emergence of new economic powers such as China, have been of greater importance.
There is little direct danger posed to the Arab spring. The ambitions of this movement are socially and economically progressive: vastly different from al Qaeda's aims. Bin Laden's diminishing influence since 2001 may also be observed in the Middle East and North Africa where tyrants are being toppled without recourse to the violent tactics, intolerance and religious extremism he represented. Though the democratisation process will be slow, and will doubtless suffer some setbacks, the Arab spring is a catalyst that brings real hope for broad-based prosperity over the longer term.
Bin Laden's death is an advance that may eventually help the U.S. economy and its currency by providing scope to reduce defence spending and the budget deficit. But near-term market moves will depend on whether or not risks associated with his death bolster the dollar, and curb the dollar carry trade that has been favouring speculative excesses. The silver price, which had become ridiculously extended, the most egregious example at present of speculative excess in the global economy, plunged overnight. It would not take much for silver, equities and commodities to turn tail and retreat more.
Bin Laden's death is a victory that comes with uncertain consequences in the short term. For all that, though, it is still a victory, and an important one for the world and the United States.
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CONTEXT NEWS
-- Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed on May 1 in a firefight with U.S. security forces in Pakistan, President Barack Obama has said.
-- "Justice has been done," Obama said in a late-night White House speech announcing the death of the elusive mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people.
-- Obama said U.S. forces led a targeted operation that killed bin Laden in Abbottabad north of Islamabad. His body was recovered, he said.
-- The U.S. State Department on Sunday warned Americans worldwide of "enhanced potential for anti-American violence."
-- In Asian trading on May 2 the price of silver fell by 10 percent following news of bin Laden's death, to $43.04 an ounce, its lowest in nearly two weeks, before recovering to $44.92. The U.S. dollar index traded at 73.15, up 0.3 percent on the day in Asian trading recovering from falls last week that took it to its lowest level since mid-2008. -- Reuters story: Bin Laden killed in shootout with U.S. forces in Pakistan [ID:nL3E7G20ZD]
-- Reuters TAKE-A-LOOK [ID:nBINLADEN]
-- For previous columns by the authors, Reuters customers can click on [GALANI/] and [CAMPBELL/]
(Editing by Robert Cole and David Evans)
========
Brides of Al Qaeda
Sunday Magazine Feature
By Iftikhar Firdous
Published: May 1, 2011
“Who is it?” asks 12-year-old Khadijah as she unlocks the door to her home. Her accent differs from that of a Khyber Pakhtunkhwa native’s — and after she pulls open the door, her unique features further pique my curiosity. Where are Khadijah and her family really from?
Khadijah is one of the thousands of people in Pakistan whose lives have been influenced by the war in neighbouring Afghanistan, a country that has seen nothing but confliuct for three decades. Khadijah is actually the granddaughter of Sufi Hameed Gul, who is famous in this small town of Regi, situated some 12 kilometres from the provincial capital of Peshawar. Although he is a respectable religious cleric, Sufi Hameed Gul’s fame stems from the fact that he is the father in-law of two former Guantanamo detainees.
Gul married three of his daughters, Mahdia, Murshida and Aisha, to men of Arab descent after the Russian-Afghan War.
“A number of Arabs came to our village” he says. “They were mujahideen, and it was my duty to help them in every possible way,” he says, suggesting that there can be no further argument on this point. Three suspected Al Qaeda operatives, Adil Hadi al Jazairi bin Hamlili, Mustafa Hamlili and Abdul Karim, lived in this village for more than 15 years.
Even at the age of eighty, Gul’s eyes light up as he talks about his war-ravaged past. “It was the worst of times. I had to escape from Afghanistan some 60 years ago.” Clasping the hands of his grandchildren, he reveals that he was a student at a madrassah in Swabi which followed the Panj Pir school of thought. After completing his studies, he travelled to Khewa, a village in the Dara-e-Noor district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province.
“I delivered a fiery sermon in the mosque,” he says. “I warned the locals that their religious creed was polluted and they should mend their ways! But it was Zahir Shah’s era and I was labelled a Pakistani agent.” Gul managed to escape from his village on the very same night that intelligence officials raided it, but three of his close friends and followers were taken into custody, and were never heard from again.
“Then I came to this village, where I served as an imam in the mosque. The elders of the village wanted me to get married and stay here. At first I resisted.” He pauses, but then continues with a mischievous smile and octogenarian innocence. “I knew I could not go back so I took the offer. But I had five daughters and no son. My wife died during childbirth so I remarried in the hope of having a male child, but it never worked out — my second wife went through a surgery which left her sterile.”
“I couldn’t have much of what I wanted with five daughters,” he says.
Perhaps it was his desire to have a son that compelled Sufi Hamid Gul to marry his daughters off to relatively unknown individuals. One night, when someone knocked on his door asking if he could speak Arabic, Gul did not hesitate to show his proficiency in the language. “I was taken to a madrassah called Jamaa-e-Asria near the boundary of the tribal areas, where I met a couple of young men who spoke nothing but Arabic.”
Gul resolved their problems and went back home. After almost a week the men came searching for him to his native village. “They were not impressed with my linguistic skills,” he laughs, “but they wanted to get married!”
He immediately married off two of his daughters, Murshida and Aisha, to Abdul Kareem and Adil Hadi al Jazairi bin Hamlili. Mahdia was married to Mustafa seven years later. Although Gul does not say much about the economic benefits that came along with the marriages, the locals of the area do. When asked what the Arabs’ occupation was and how they earned a living, an elderly villager said: “They were very well connected; they just made a few phone calls and got whatever they needed.”
As it happens, Adil al Jazairi and Mustafa Hamlili were arrested by security forces in Pakistan as a result of the policies put in place in the aftermath of 9/11, in June 2003. Adil was accused of arranging money transfers and travel documents for the Al Qaeda and was arrested from Peshawar’s Hayatabad area. Mustafa and another friend, whose name the family cannot recall, were taken into custody when around 3,000 security and intelligence personnel went on a rampage in the villages near Regi. “There were four Americans along with the armed men,” recalls Gul. “They identified the two boys and took them while we were left unharmed.
The night before the raid, Gul received a call from an unknown number. The caller did not identify himself but told him to move “his guest” to a safer location. “I gathered the boys and told them about the call but they refused to go. However, I told them not to resort to violence as it was the trust of the people of the village that was at stake,” he explains. The men ended up in the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. “Since then I have been interrogated thrice by the Americans, once by a woman and twice by men who did not provide any information about themselves,” he adds.
“Abdul Karim, the eldest amongst the Arabs, went missing around 18 years ago,” continues Gul. “He went away to Mauritania and never returned. We tried to contact him several times,” says a tearful Gul, as he sits with his daughters and their children.
Gul’s daughter, Mahdia, is in her early 30s and says she travelled extensively to Yemen and Afghanistan with her husband Mustafa. She speaks in a stifled tone about her travels. “We stayed in Yemen, in some place which I cannot recall, but it was beautiful in its own way,” she says. It was when the Taliban took over in Afghanistan that Mahdia shifted to Kandahar. “I did not know what my husband was doing, but whatever he did gave him a lot of respect amongst the ranks of the Taliban,” recalls a frightened Mahdia. At the same time, her sister Aisha lived with Adil in Kabul and recalls that they never lacked any facilities since “we were immensely respected amongst the women because we were the wives of the people who basically funded all the activity around us.”
But the situation has changed since they were the wives of suspected — and respected — Al Qaeda operatives. Now, their home speaks volumes about the state of poverty they live in. Gul cannot afford to send any of his 13 grandchildren to school. His daughters are now the breadwinners of the family, ever since the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) gave them a sewing machine to stitch and sell clothes. Alienated from their fellow villagers, they live in near seclusion. Their only connection with their husbands was through letters sent to them from Guantanamo Bay via the ICRC, who also arranged a video conference call for them to finally see each other after years.
According to a 2006 report by Mark Denbeaux, a professor at Seton Hall University Law School and counsel to two Guantanamo detainees, and his son Joshua Denbeaux, at least 36 per cent of detainees at Guantanamo Bay were captured by Pakistani authorities or in Pakistan. Over 170 detainees still remain at the facility. Freed detainees have returned to their home countries as well as to others, including Germany and Switzerland. But resettling detainees has been a sore issue for many governments.
“The ICRC said they would help us meet our husbands,” Aisha says. “They mentioned that we could meet them in a different country, like Canada.” Nothing has materialised so far.
So Aisha, Mahdia and Murshida remain forgotten and forsaken, yet another family split apart as a result of the war on terror which shows no signs of abating just yet.
After the family was interviewed, this correspondent was contacted by Adil al Jazairi. Under constant surveillance in Algeria, he says: “I long to meet my family, but all my travel documents have been taken away by the government”. Al Jazairi said he was living a life of extreme poverty. Despite several attempts to contact him after that one phone call, he could not be reached again. Thousands of miles from Algeria, his family waits for a man who may never come home.
Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, May 1st, 2011
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'Bin Ladan was killed years ago'
Mon May 2, 2011 3:34PM
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A 2007 Benazir Bhutto interview in which she says the al-Qaeda leader was 'murdered' years ago contributes to the uncertainty surrounding US claims about Osama bin Laden's death.
On Monday, US President Barack Obama announced that the al-Qaeda leader was killed by US forces after he was found hiding in a compound in Pakistan.
This is while in an interview following a failed assassination attempt on Pakistan's former premier in October 2007, Bhutto says bin Laden has already been killed.
She even identifies the man who killed the notorious al-Qaeda leader as one Omar Sheikh.
In response to a question whether any of the assassins had links with the government, Bhutto said, "Yes but one of them is a very key figure in security, he is a former military officer … and had dealings with Omar Sheikh, the man who murdered Osama Bin Laden.”
Bhutto was assassinated on December 27, 2007 in a bomb attack as she was leaving an election rally in Rawalpindi when a gunman shot her in the neck and set off a bomb.
The announcement of bin Laden's death comes almost ten years after the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Meanwhile, a US official says bin Laden's body has been buried at sea, alleging that his hasty burial was in accordance with Islamic law, which requires burial within 24 hours of death.
This is while burial at sea is not an Islamic practice and Islam does not determine a timeframe for burial.
The official added that finding a country willing to accept the remains of the world's most wanted man was difficult, so the US decided to bury him at sea.
WASHINGTON: Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was buried at sea from the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the north Arabian Sea after being washed according to Islamic custom and receiving a religious funeral, a U.S. defense official said on Monday.
"Preparations for at-sea burial began at 1:10 a.m. EST (0510 GMT) and were completed at 2 a.m. EST," the official said. "Traditional procedures for Islamic burial were followed."
"The deceased's body was washed and then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag. a military officer read prepared religious remarks which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was place on a prepared flat board, tipped up, whereupon the deceased's body eased into the sea," the official said. AGENCIES
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Muslim rites: Osama ‘buried’ in Arabian Sea
By Agencies
Published: May 3, 2011
The body was transported to the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, which brought him to his final resting place somewhere in the north Arabian Sea. PHOTO: REUTERS/FILE
WASHINGTON:
US forces administered Muslim religious rites for Osama bin Laden aboard an aircraft carrier on Monday in the Arabian Sea, an American official said after the raid that killed the al Qaeda leader.
“Today religious rights were conducted for the deceased on the deck of the USS Carl-Vinson which is located in the North Arabian Sea,” a senior defence official said.
“Traditional procedures for Islamic burial were followed. The deceased’s body was washed and then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag.
“A military officer read prepared religious remarks which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat-board… (and) eased into the sea.”
The ceremony began at 0510 GMT and ended some 50 minutes later aboard the aircraft carrier which is stationed off the coast of Pakistan to help US and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
However, the head of Egypt’s prestigious seat of Muslim learning, al Azhar, condemned disposal of the body of Osama bin Laden at sea on Monday as an affront to religious and human values.
Muslims set great store by interment in permanent graves on land and accept burial at sea only in cases where the body cannot be preserved intact aboard ship until it reaches shore.
“The Grand Imam, Dr Ahmed El-Tayeb, the sheikh of al Azhar condemned the reports, if true, of the throwing of the body of Osama into the sea,” according to a statement released by al Azhar, which is respected around the world by many Sunni Muslims as a seat of religious learning.
The procedure “contradicts all the religious values and human norms”, it said: “The Grand Imam asserted that it is forbidden in Islam to deform the dead, regardless of their beliefs. One honours the dead by burying them.”
Published in The Express Tribune, May 3rd, 2011.
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Osama bin Laden: ‘Stop govt from handing over body’
Published: May 3, 2011
Petition filed in LHC also challenging US action on Pak soil as illegal.
LAHORE:
A petition has been filed in the Lahore High Court seeking directions to the federal government not to hand over Osama Bin Laden’s body to American authorities.
The Al Qaeda leader was killed in an operation conducted by American special forces in Abbottabad on Sunday night. Barrister Mohammed Javaid Iqbal Jaffree filed the petition on Monday seeking to stop the government from allowing Bin Laden’s body to leave the country. He appeared not to believe a statement by US authorities that Bin Laden’s body had been buried at sea.
The petition also challenged the US military action on Pakistani territory as a violation of the sovereignty of the country and of international law.
Jaffree asked the court to direct the government to arrest and take action against those who had tipped-off the US about Bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan. He also asked the court to seek a report from the government about the US operation in Abbottabad.
There were several unsubstantiated claims in the petition. Jaffree said there were reports that the US armed forces had captured at least 120 people, including two of Bin Laden’s wives, in the operation. He said six “disguised Americans” were also killed in the “staged performance”. He said the location of the operation close the Pakistan Military Academy at Kakul was “a well-designed slap in the face of the Pakistani military establishment”. He said there was also a “suggestion” that Bin Laden had been arrested somewhere along the Pak-Afghan border and brought to Abbottabad “for show business purposes”.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 3rd, 2011.
=
What after Osama?
By Ayesha Siddiqa
Published: May 3, 2011
The death of Osama is likely to raise more questions about Pakistan's intention in fighting terrorism. PHOTO: REUTERS
In the days to come, the death Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad at the hands of the US military is likely to raise more questions about Pakistan’s intention in fighting terrorism than as a major achievement of Pakistan-US cooperation in the war on terror.
Islamabad, as it is obvious from the bland tone of the Foreign Office statement, cannot even openly claim any deep responsibility out of fear of repercussion from supporters of al Qaeda and militant jihadis within the country. The fact that he was living so close to the capital city undetected for so long will give cause for many to point a finger at Pakistan and say “didn’t we always say that?”
The pro-jihad, pro-GHQ media will most likely spring into action and decry the story as yet another propaganda campaign. One possible argument will be that Pakistan is being denied the glory of facilitating the operation.
Geo-politically, this capture could result in an acceleration of the already-planned US withdrawal from Afghanistan since the United States has now attained one of the primary objectives of its military presence in South Asia. However, this withdrawal may not necessarily mean lead to scaling down of CIA operations in Pakistan.
Indeed, the success of this operation will provide an excuse to US intelligence in keep probing in Pakistan to eliminate various sources of terrorism. The world will also be less sympathetic to Pakistan’s military and its capacity or willingness to challenge terrorism in the country.
While analysts are likely to focus more on what will this mean for the future of US-Pakistan relations, there is a need to look at the event as opening up possibilities for the country. It is certainly a good opportunity for policymakers, especially military commanders, to review the national and military strategies on fighting forces of terror.
Many people are already talking about an impending US withdrawal from Afghanistan, which, in turn, means that Pakistan will no longer remain a frontline state. The change in status will have a set of consequences, including a lesser flow of outside resources. However, the most important consequence is that Islamabad would have to think about building its own capability to fight networks of terror that that sprung up and strengthened inside Pakistan – some which are even al Qaeda franchises.
Harkatul Jihadul Islami, Jaishe Muhammad, Sipahe Sahaba, Lashkar-e-Jhangavi and Lashkar-e-Taiba are some of the many organisations that were allowed to spread their network and physical infrastructure into the ‘settled’ areas of Pakistan such as Punjab and Sindh.
These organisations have deep links with al Qaeda and have allegedly collaborated with Osama bin Laden’s terror network against targets in Pakistan and South Asia at large. The larger Asian region is concerned about the linkages as recent stories have emerged regarding individuals coming from Indonesia and many countries in Europe to train in Pakistan.
From a broader perspective, this may be an opportunity for the various elements of the Pakistani state to consolidate their thinking on how to fight the menace. It could develop the will to fight terrorism and keep people better informed about the militant elements which have penetrated the state and society at large.
Most of the militant outfits now have developed influential ties within the mainstream political parties as well. These militant forces might not conduct a vicious attack on the Pakistani state just yet. But they are likely to use the chaos to re-group and consolidate through manipulating the public discourse on terrorism run through the private and public media.
What is most certain is that the right-wing media (which is actually the bulk of mainstream media) will begin turning the event around on its head to classify this as some sort of super conspiracy against Pakistan.
The bottom-line is that the capture of Osama is a historical event which may not necessarily streamline Pakistan’s own policy on fighting the war on terror. That is unfortunate because with reduced US interest in Afghanistan, Islamabad would increasingly face the consequences of dealing with the local militant elements.
These private warriors, viewed by some as ‘strategic assets’, may now prove costly for the state’s security because Islamabad will have to fight this battle alone.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 3rd, 2011.
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Bin Laden kill may reopen CIA interrogation debate
03 May 2011 02:19
Source: reuters // Reuters
* Information on bin Laden courier came from detainees
* But "enhanced interrogations" were being curbed
* Debate over alleged U.S. "torture" likely to resume
(Corrects fourth graph to say Mohammed divulged existence of courier rather than the name of the courier)
By Mark Hosenball
WASHINGTON, May 2 (Reuters) - The possibility that U.S. spies located Osama bin Laden with help from detainees who'd been subjected to "enhanced interrogation" techniques seems certain to reopen the debate over practices that many have equated with torture, security experts said on Monday.
One of the key sources for initial information about an al Qaeda "courier" who led U.S. authorities to bin Laden's Pakistani hide-out was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al Qaeda operative said to have masterminded the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, a former U.S. national security official said.
KSM, as he was known to U.S. officials, was subjected to "waterboarding" 183 times, the U.S. government has acknowledged.
But it was not until later, after waterboarding was suspended because it and other harsh techniques became heatedly debated, that Mohammed told interrogators about the existence of a courier particularly close to bin Laden, a fragmentary tip that touched off a years-long manhunt that ended in bin Laden's death at the hands of U.S. special forces on Sunday.
And at the time the information surfaced, the CIA had already abandoned some of its most controversial interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, in which water is poured over the face of an interrogation subject to simulate drowning, current and former U.S. officials told Reuters.
But the possibility that detainees who at some point were subjected to physical coercion later gave up information leading to bin Laden's discovery is sparking discussion among intelligence experts as to whether he could have been found without them.
SUSPENSION OF TECHNIQUES
"It will reignite a debate that hasn't gone away about the morality and ethicacy of certain techniques," said Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
"Waterboarding" and other physically-coercive interrogation techniques used on detained militants, including depriving them of sleep, making them pose in uncomfortable positions, and slamming them into walls, were authorized by President George W. Bush in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
The tactics were used on detainees held by the CIA at secret prisons outside the United States.
In 2004, the CIA suspended these techniques. Subsequent revelations about agency practices led to charges the United States had engaged in torture.
Veterans of the Bush administration were quick to claim credit for the torture-like techniques, which President Barack Obama banned soon after taking office in 2009.
Paul Wolfowitz, Bush's deputy defense secretary, said the successful operation against bin Laden showed the value of the Bush administration's interrogation policies.
"I think it ... rested heavily on some of those controversial policies," Wolfowitz told reporters in a phone briefing by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, where he's a visiting scholar.
"This would not have been possible if we were releasing terrorists willy-nilly and not keeping them for the information they had, some of which often may not look that important, like the pseudonym of a driver, until it turns out that he's really a critical person," Wolfowitz said.
ROLE IN BIN LADEN CAPTURE?
But former U.S. officials told Reuters of a sequence of events that raises questions about whether the enhanced interrogation means played a significant role in bin Laden's capture.
A former U.S. counter-terrorism official who was briefed on detainee information about bin Laden and his entourage said, for instance, the CIA stopped using harsh interrogation methods on KSM after 2003.
But the first key intelligence reports identifying the al Qaeda courier reached U.S. counter-terrorism officials in 2004, according to a former U.S. national security official with direct personal knowledge.
The official said that for three years after the CIA stopped subjecting him to coercive measures, KSM continued to talk extensively. It was during this period, the official said, that he believes KSM gave up information about the courier.
A second former U.S. official said that while he did not remember which detainee gave up the key tip about the courier, he confirmed that the information came in in 2004, after the CIA had abandoned waterboarding but before it had completely stopped the use of physically stressful techniques.
This official, and two other current intelligence officials, said that in their view the main objective of the enhanced interrogation techniques was to break down resistance of detainees.
"You didn't use the techniques if they started talking," one of the officials said.
Obama Administration officials confirmed the sequence of events -- U.S. intelligence did not learn the identity of the courier until after the CIA interrogation program was terminated.
Administration officials also said it was not until August 2010 that U.S. authorities learned the location of the fortified mansion in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where U.S. special forces troops killed bin Laden during a commando raid on Sunday.
(Additional reporting by David Alexander; editing by Warren Strobel and Philip Barbara)
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After Uncertainty, a Moment of Triumph in the Situation Room: 'We've IDed Geronimo'
By MICHAEL SCHERER Michael Scherer – Mon May 2, 6:15 pm ET
The people who gathered Sunday in the Situation Room know all about high-pressure situations. But this was something else. For 40 minutes, the President and his senior aides could do nothing but watch the video screens and listen to the operation and ensuing firefight on the other side of the world. At Barack Obama's orders, special operations teams were invading the airspace of a foreign country, targeting a compound with unknown occupants, and hoping to get out unscathed. The target was America's No. 1 enemy, Osama bin Laden. But no one knew for sure if he was even there.
The President sat stone-faced through much of the events. Several of his aides, however, were pacing. For long periods of time, nobody said a thing, as everyone waited for the next update. In the modern age, Presidents can experience their own military actions like a video game, except that they have no control over the events. They cannot, and would not, intervene to contact the commanders running the operation. So when word came that a helicopter had been grounded, a sign that the plan was already off course, the tension increased. (See pictures of Osama bin Laden's Pakistan hideout.)
Minutes later, more word came over the transom. "We've IDed Geronimo," said a disembodied voice, using the agreed-upon code name for America's most wanted enemy, Osama bin Laden. Word then came that Geronimo had been killed. Only when the last helicopter lifted off some minutes later did the President know that his forces had sustained no casualties. (See pictures of people celebrating Osama bin Laden's death.)
The decision to attack had been made days earlier by the President. He gathered his senior intelligence, military and diplomatic team together in the Situation Room on Thursday afternoon to hear his options. There were already concerns about operational security. At that point, hundreds of people had already been read into the potential whereabouts of bin Laden. Any leak would have ruined the entire mission.
The intelligence professionals said they did not know for sure that bin Laden was in the compound. The case was good, but circumstantial. The likelihood, officials told the President, was between 50% and 80%. No slam dunk. Obama went around the table asking everyone to state their opinion. He quizzed his staff about worst case scenarios - the possibility of civilian casualties, a hostage situation, a diplomatic blow-up with Pakistan, a downed helicopter. He was presented with three options: Wait to gather more intelligence, attack with targeted bombs from the air, or go in on the ground with troops. The room was divided about 50-50, said a person in the room. John Brennan, the President's senior counter-terrorism adviser, supported a ground strike, as did the operational people, including Leon Panetta at the CIA. Others called for more time. In the end, about half of the senior aides supported a helicopter assault. The other half said either wait, or strike from above. (See TIME's al-Qaeda covers.)
Obama left the meeting without signaling his intent. He wanted to sleep on it. At about 8:00 a.m. on Friday, just before he boarded a helicopter that would take him to tour tornado damage in Alabama, Obama called his senior aides into the Diplomatic Room. He told them his decision: A helicopter assault. At that point, the operation was taken out of his hands. He was trusting the fate of his presidency to luck. He was putting his presidency in the hands of history.
====
Osama bin Laden's son says his father is still alive
Omar Bin Laden, the son of fugitive terrorist Osama Bin Laden, has said that he believes his father is still alive, although he does not know where he is.
Omar bin Laden
Omar bin Laden during a dinner party he and his wife Zaina held at his horse ranch near Cairo on September 11, 2008 Photo: AFP
7:00AM BST 15 Jul 2010
"My dad is on the Earth but I don't know where. He's still alive. If that sort of person dies, you could never make it a secret. The world changes if he dies," he said in an interview.
Mr Bin Laden, 29, said he still loved his father, but he does not want to be like him.
"It's a weak son who just wants to be like his daddy," he told the Sun.
"I still love him - of course I do - he's my father. That's a normal human situation. I miss him as a father but we are different. I want peace."
Mr Bin Laden also spoke about his love of American culture, saying that he enjoys Jim Carrey films, American football, rock music and even Laurel And Hardy.
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He also said he wanted to visit America.
"My father said the only good thing to come out of America were weapons - like Stinger missiles.
"But I want to go to America and I would love to meet Drew Barrymore. I am single now and she is the most beautiful woman in Hollywood."
Responding to claims from his former wife that he had heard his father's voice in his head, he admitted he was suffering from depression because he missed his family.
"The dream I have is that he is driving a truck and I stand in his way so he has to change direction. I hope to change his way for good, but it's only a dream.
"I admit I'm suffering from depression and taking anti-depressants because of the worry about my family, including two brothers being held in Iran for nine years.
"They are innocent. They are not terrorists but they are very down that they cannot leave Iran. I am very stressed and worried for them but I'm not schizophrenic."
=====
Islamist militants hold prayers for bin Laden in Pakistan
03 May 2011 13:57
Source: reuters // Reuters
(Updates with prayers in Karachi)
By Zeeshan Haider
ISLAMABAD, May 3 (Reuters) - The founder one of Pakistan's most violent Islamist militant groups has told Muslims to be heartened by the death of Osama bin Laden, as his "martyrdom" would not be in vain, a spokesman for the group said on Tuesday.
Lashkar-e-Taiba (Let), the militant group blamed for the 2008 terror attacks on Mumbai, has been holding special prayers for bin Laden in several cities and towns since he was killed in an operation by U.S. forces in Pakistan's northwestern garrison town of Abbottabad on Monday.
A spokesman for LeT founder Hafiz Mohammad Saeed said he had told followers in the eastern city of Lahore that the "great person" of Osama bin Laden would continue to be a source of strength and encouragement for Muslims around the world.
"Osama bin Laden was a great person who awakened the Muslim world," Saeed's spokesman Yahya Mujahid quoted him as saying during prayers at the headquarters of the LeT's charity in Lahore on Monday.
"Martyrdoms are not losses, but are a matter of pride for Muslims", Saeed said. "Osama bin Laden has rendered great sacrifices for Islam and Muslims, and these will always be remembered."
Amidst shouts of "Down with America" and "Down with Obama", around 1,000 of Saeed's followers held prayers in Pakistan's largest city of Karachi.
"May Allah accept the sacrifice of Osama bin Laden," local leader of Let's charity, Naveed Qamar, said at the prayers.
LeT, one of the largest and best-funded Islamist militant organisations in South Asia, is blamed for the November 2008 assault on Mumbai, which killed 166 people in India's commercial hub. Its founder, Saeed, now heads an Islamic charity, a group the United Nations says is a front for the militant group.
Western security analysts believe that LeT is linked to al Qaeda, though LeT officials deny this.
Mujahid said thousands of Saeed's followers, many of them often in tears, took part in the prayers.
Saeed founded LeT in the 1990s but abandoned its leadership after India blamed it and another militant group for an attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001.
The group was nurtured by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency to fight India in Kashmir, and analysts say it is still being unofficially tolerated by Pakistan, even though it was banned in the country in 2002.
Admiral Robert Willard, the head of the United States military's Pacific Command, last month expressed concern over the expanding reach of LeT, saying it was no longer solely focused on India, or even in South Asia. (Additional reporting by Faisal Aziz; Editing by Rebecca Conway Miral Fahmy and Sanjeev Miglani)
===
By Mark Hosenball Mark Hosenball – Mon May 2, 11:47 pm ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. special forces set out to kill Osama bin Laden and dump his body in the sea to make it harder for the al Qaeda founder to become a martyr, U.S. national security officials told Reuters on Monday.
"This was a kill operation," one of the officials said.
"If he had waved a white flag of surrender, he would have been taken alive," the official added. But the operating assumption among the U.S. raiders, he added, was that bin Laden would put up a fight -- which he did.
Bin Laden "participated" in a firefight between the U.S. commandos and residents of the fortified compound near the Pakistani capital Islamabad where he had been hiding, the official said.
Other U.S. officials said the U.S. strike team shot the al Qaeda leader dead with bullets to the chest and head during the course of the 40-minute operation. He did not return fire.
Three other men and a woman lay dead after the raid, but no Americans were killed. Bin Laden's wife, originally thought killed, was only wounded. The woman killed in the raid was not used as a human shield by the al Qaeda leader before his death, a U.S. official said, correcting an earlier description.
John Brennan, President Barack Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, had said U.S. officials believed the dead woman was one of bin Laden's wives and that he had used her as a human shield.
Brennan said the commandos were prepared to capture bin Laden alive, but they knew that was a remote possibility.
"If we had the opportunity to take bin Laden alive, if he didn't present any threat, the individuals involved were able and prepared to do that," Brennan told reporters.
"The concern was that bin Laden would oppose any type of capture operation. Indeed, he did. It was a firefight. He, therefore, was killed in that firefight, and that's when the remains were removed."
The operation was carried out by a team of about 15 special forces operatives -- most, if not all, U.S. Navy SEALs, according to U.S. officials familiar with the details. They indicated the team was based in Afghanistan.
One official said it included forensic specialists whose job was to collect evidence proving that bin Laden was caught in the raid and intelligence that might be useful in tracking down other al Qaeda leaders or foiling ongoing plots.
National Journal said U.S. authorities used intelligence about bin Laden's compound to build a replica of it and use it for trial runs in early April.
Within hours of bin Laden's death, which Obama announced in a dramatic, late-night White House speech, the commandos had buried bin Laden's body at sea, two U.S. officials said.
It was done so that bin Laden's body would not become a symbol of veneration or inspiration for would-be militants, U.S. officials said.
"You wouldn't want to leave him so that his body could become a shrine," one of the officials said.
CIA WAS CONFIDENT
U.S. officials said the key information that eventually led to bin Laden's trail came from questioning of militants detained by U.S. forces following the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.
Captured militants, including some held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, told intelligence officials of a particular al Qaeda "courier" whom they had heard was close to bin Laden.
They also mentioned two captured al Qaeda operations chiefs, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, widely believed to have masterminded the attacks.
Initially U.S. intelligence did not know either the name or whereabouts of the courier. But officials said that about four years ago, U.S. agencies learned the individual's name.
Two years ago, U.S. intelligence received credible information indicating that the courier and his brother, another suspected militant operative, were operating somewhere near Islamabad.
Then, in August 2010, the U.S. pinpointed the compound in Abbottabad where intelligence indicated the two brothers, their families, and a third large family were living.
It was located in a ritzy neighborhood at the end of a dirt road, not far from one of Pakistan's principal military academies. Residents of the area included retired Pakistani military officers.
Working with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which analyzes pictures from spy satellites and aircraft, and the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, the CIA concluded that the compound was built with unusual security features -- including high-walls topped with barbed-wire -- and that its inhabitants appeared to take unusual security precautions.
By earlier this year, the CIA believed that it had "high confidence" that a "high-value" al Qaeda target was at the Abbottabad compound, and a strong probability that this target was bin Laden.
But one official said the agency was never "100 percent certain" that bin Laden was the one who was hiding out.
(This story was corrected in the seventh paragraph to say commandos were prepared to capture bin Laden alive, not Obama)
(Additional reporting by Steve Holland and Jeff Mason; editing by Warren Strobel and Mohammad Zargham)
===
Bin Laden’s Burial
May 4, 2011Mohammed AbdullahLeave a commentGo to comments
There seems to be some controversy over how Osama’s body was disposed of. Chucking it in the sea apparently is offensive to some Muslims. By some Muslims, I mean some rather important ones. For example, “The Grand Imam, Dr Ahmed El-Tayeb, the sheikh of Al-Azhar
condemned the reports, if true, of the throwing of the body of
Osama bin Laden into the sea,”. Well, this is no dungeon in the back streets of Forest Gate, it’s al Azhar, the highest seat of learning in the Islamic world. It’s a serious institution, and we should take what they say seriously.
Less serious, however, is the old ‘Tottenham Ayatollah’ Omar Bakri Mohammad. This rather clownish fellow (as clownish as someone of his extraction can be) claimed “The Americans want to humiliate Muslims through this burial, and I don’t think this is in the interest of the U.S. administration”.
http://tinyurl.com/3jun8jk and http://tinyurl.com/3gx59m3
Sheikh Omar doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going. He was here for 20 years during which time he set up al Muhajiroun. He then left to Lebanon after which he was not permitted to return to the UK, despite desperately trying during 2006 war. He can count amongst his esteemed students Andy Chowder, who was on Newsnight giving his view on the bin Laden death. Sometimes it’s hard to know whether Andy is serious or just having a laugh with us all, but I hope that the general public see him the way I (and probably Jeremy Paxman) do – a bit of light entertainment.
Back to the point. Why is this a big issue? Is it a desperate clutch at the last straw to venerate bin Laden in an oblique way so as to not appear to overtly support him? Thousands of Muslims have had their bodies violated in the most despicable ways – often at the hands of other Muslims.
Despite the well-meaning, strained assertion by people – Muslim and non-Muslim alike – that only a minority of Muslims support OBL and his movement, I don’t think that it’s a particularly small minority. Infact, by any reasonable person’s standards, it’s probably a remarkably large one.
Furthermore, who is a Muslim? It seems that bin Laden, despite all he had done, was firmly a Muslim. Yet some will use the flimsiest excuse to excommunicate people from the religion. One of the most absurd off the top of my head is the example of the “sorcerer” from a Lebanese TV channel who was arrested in Saudi Arabia and faced beheading for apostacy. Ironically, he was on his way to Hajj. I don’t know what transpired of that, but an Egyptian man was, infact beheaded for the same “crime” of sorcery. http://tinyurl.com/444l2pu and http://tinyurl.com/ya8xbho.
This leads us back to Iraq. In the 1991 Gulf War, the then Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, ibn Baaz, issued a fatwa that Saddam was a kafir. This is incongruent with Saddam’s later veneration by the likes of Qaradhawi as a martyr, who seemed to be following the trend of the Arab street. Some have tried to back-peddle the ibn Baaz fatwa, others just say he is not to be taken seriously (there are two kinds of Salafi, the house Salafi, who is in the pay-role of authority or yielding to it, and the field Salafi, who has something of a shorter half-life). Who is, and is not a Muslim seems to have some correlation with politics and popularism (no really?).
Nevertheless, Saddam was buried in his grave, which was adorned with flowers, flags and pictures, has prayers read over it and is visited by his supporters. It was not his burial that was controversial, of course, it was his execution. It was seen, quite simply, as overt American and Shia gloating, and there was clearly fury over it amongst many Sunni Muslims. I recall watching the Islam channel when Yvonne Ridley was in Mecca talking to some Saudi, on the occasion of Eid al Adhha. The Saudi mentioned that the Shia need to be careful how they cultivate their victories, because they are a minority in the Arab lands and they can be killed quite easily. I refrain from quoting, but those were pretty much his words as I recall them. Ms Ridly became very quickly and noticeably uncomfortable, saying something along the lines of it being Hajj and Muslims are supposed to be coming together.
Personally I couldn’t care less about people being offended by Saddam’s execution, or whether it was perceived to be gloating, if anything, it’s a nice bonus. What was more concerning was that there were revenge attacks, such as people being hung from lamp-posts, or executed in other ways. Did the Iraq government do the right thing, given what followed? Should we yield to bullies? Were they not going to kill anyway? I don’t know, but my only concern is the safety and security of Iraqis, not the sensitivities, religious or otherwise, of supporters of horrid murderers like Saddam and Osama….except, of course in as far as they affect the aforementioned concern.
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OSAMA BIN LADEN’S UNBORN GRANDCHILDREN KILLED IN SYRIA ATTACK.
Posted by Janice on September 14, 2010
THE British surrogate mum who was carrying Osama Bin Laden’s twin grandchildren has lost both babies after allegedly being beaten up.
Louise Pollard, 24, from Bristol, had been acting for Bin Laden’s son Omar, 30, and his British wife Zaina, 54, who have recently separated.
She had been travelling in Syria with Zaina when she was attacked by two men as she walked home alone from a café at night. Here
All in all it’s probably a blessing in disguise.
===
Pakistan Islamists to protest against U.S. bin Laden raid
05 May 2011 06:38
Source: reuters // Reuters
By Saeed Azhar
ISLAMABAD, May 5 (Reuters) - Pakistan's most influential Islamist party urged its followers to hold mass rallies on Friday to demand their government withdraw its support of the U.S. war on militancy after U.S. commandos killed Osama bin Laden near Islamabad.
Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), one of the country's biggest religious political parties, said the United States had violated the sovereignty of key ally Pakistan by sending its own forces into the garrison town of Abbottabad to kill the al Qaeda leader.
Pakistan's support is key to U.S. efforts to combat Islamist militants, and also to fighting against the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan.
"Even if there was any sympathy for the Americans, that would dissipate after the way they crushed and violated our sovereignty and our independence," JI chief Syed Munawar Hasan told Reuters on Thursday.
"We have appealed to everyone to hold peaceful demonstrations on Friday on a very large scale," he said. "Our first demand is Pakistan.... should withdraw from the war on terror."
Anti-American sentiment runs high in Pakistan, despite billions of dollars in aid for the nuclear-armed country with a troubled economy. Pakistan's religious parties have not traditionally done well at the ballot box, but they wield considerable influence in a country where Islam is becoming more radicalised.
There have so far been few public protests in Pakistan against bin Laden's killing early on Monday at Abbottabad, 50 kms (31 miles) north of Islamabad. One of Pakistan's most violent militant groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba, held special prayers for the al Qaeda leader and called his death "martyrdom." [ID:L3E7G32RC]
The United States war on militancy is unpopular in Pakistan, because of the often high civilian cost of drone attacks against suspected militants along the Afghan border. But many people are also critical of al Qaeda's radical interpretation of Islam and the suicide bombings its followers carry out.
The fact that bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, after having appeared to have lived there for several years, has also embarrassed many people in the government and the country's powerful spy agency. (Editing by Michael Georgy and Miral Fahmy)
===
Bin Laden: How They Got Him -- and What Happens to al-Qaeda Now
Time.com
By MARK THOMPSON Mark Thompson – Mon May 2, 10:35 am ET
The reports started coming in more than a month ago: Osama bin Laden was on the move, and the U.S. had its eye on him. Stressed by the turmoil sweeping his part of the world - tumult he had no roll in sparking - bin Laden was trying to bolster al-Qaeda's credibility as young people Tweeted and Facebooked about a future that didn't involve him, or al-Qaeda.
Surprisingly, he didn't die a standoff death from an unseen Predator drone, as most would have expected. Instead, a team of U.S. special-operations forces helicoptered into a high-walled compound deep inside Pakistan and killed him and four others in a firefight, including a son of bin Laden and a woman allegedly being used as a human shield. (Is Pakistan Losing Patience in the War on Terror?)
Dispatching a special-forces team into Pakistan makes two things crystal clear: the U.S. believed its intelligence was solid, and it wanted proof he was dead; they wanted his corpse. One of the choppers involved in the raid malfunction and was destroyed; no U.S. personnel were injured in the operation, which lasted about 40 minutes.
The whereabouts and fate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy, remain unknown. Whether bin Laden's death sparks a spasm of violence - or marks the end of al Qaeda as a potent terror force - also remains unclear. Al-Zawahri, an Egyptian-born doctor, recently encouraged Muslims to fight the U.S. and its allies in Libya. "I want to direct the attention of our Muslim brothers in Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and the rest of the Muslim countries, that if the Americans and the NATO forces enter Libya then their neighbors in Egypt and Tunisia and Algeria and the rest of the Muslim countries should rise up and fight both the mercenaries of Gaddafi and the rest of NATO," Zawahri said, according to the SITE Intelligence Group.
There was a quiet giddiness among U.S. military personnel late Sunday as word began to spread that Osama bin Laden had been killed. This is scant consolation to the survivors of the 3,000 killed that late summer day, but it represents sweet vindication nonetheless.
U.S. intelligence had learned that bin Laden might be holed up in a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, some 50 miles northeast of Islamabad, last August. Basically a suburb of the capital, the well-to-do city is home to many retired Pakistani military officers. That may explain the extraordinary secrecy surround the operation: few top officials in the U.S. government knew such an operation was afoot, and news of it wasn't shared with any allies, including Pakistan. How bin Laden was able to reside in a posh compound for months, if not years, surrounded by former Pakistani military officers remains unknown. (Pakistan-U.S. Border Spat: Crippling the Afghanistan Campaign?)
A U.S. official said a key clue to tracking bin Laden down was learning the name of a trusted courier, which led U.S. intelligence to the compound raided on Sunday. After noting the compound had few electronic links to the outside world - and incinerated its trash, rather than putting it out to be picked up - Obama gave the go-ahead last week for a helicopter raid into the compound. Bin Laden "did resist the assault force," the U.S. official said, but was shot in the head and killed "as our operators came into the compound."
It would be churlish, but accurate, to point out that he had eluded a worldwide manhunt for close to a decade after eluding a tightening, but fraying, U.S.-Afghan net at Tora Bora on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in December 2001. As hundreds crowded around the White House to celebrate bin Laden's demise, it's also relevant to note that bin Laden's impact peaked on 9/11, and has dwindled ever since. Nonetheless, the symbolic impact of his death cannot be under-estimated, either in the war on terror or on Obama's re-election prospects.
The Pakistani firefight only codified what a younger generation, where women are playing a major role, has made clear: OBL was a force in a region ruled by autocrats in the 20th Century; he had much less resonance among the younger cohort now taking over.
Pentagon officials have said that al Qaeda has played only a minor role in Afghanistan in recent years. The Americans and their allies there are primarily fighting the Taliban, an indigenous force of Pashtuns whose homeland straddles the Af-Pak frontier.
Bin Laden's death only excises a tumor. The cancer that he represented remains in wide swaths of the world where local populations have been forced into have-not-dom while their leaders have lived well. Whether his demise marks the end of a particularly virulent strain, or will trigger a violent recurrence, remains unknown.
See a Bin Laden family album.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
===
Five Mistakes the Obama Administration Has Made in the Aftermath of Bin Laden Killing
Time.com
Bin Laden unarmed when shot dead: US AFP/The White House – US President Barack Obama and his key national security advisors receive an update on the mission against …
* Osama Bin Laden Raid: 40 Fatal Minutes Play Video Video:Osama Bin Laden Raid: 40 Fatal Minutes ABC News
* See No Evil: Bin Laden Death Photos Stay Sealed Play Video Barack Obama Video:See No Evil: Bin Laden Death Photos Stay Sealed FOX News
* Obama 'Spiking the Ball' at Ground Zero? Play Video Barack Obama Video:Obama 'Spiking the Ball' at Ground Zero? FOX News
By MARK HALPERIN Mark Halperin – Wed May 4, 12:15 pm ET
Aftermath can be heck.
The White House's brilliant conceptualization and execution of the plan to bring Osama bin Laden to justice has, in the last 48 hours, been complicated by mistakes.
No one can question the heroism of the US military, the doggedness of the intelligence community, or the cajones of the President in making the call. But the administration has since made real errors, some with political costs, some with substantive costs, and some with both. (See pictures of Osama bin Laden's Pakistan hideaway.)
The major errors so far:
1. Not getting its story straight: Was bin Laden armed or not? What woman served as a human shield? Who actually was killed beyond the main target? The administration deserves mountains of credit for its painstaking, conspicuous effort to brief the world on the mission, knowing a lot of information would have to be held back to protect sources, operatives, methods, and sensitive data. Which makes the carelessness of the errors somewhat surprising. The costs: the media coverage sours, the President's opponents (especially on talk radio) go crazy, other details of the mission unfairly get called into question, and the wild theories of global enemies and conspiracy seekers get a foothold.
2. Not giving George W. Bush enough credit for helping bring bin Laden to justice: Even if the White House believes the previous occupant had nothing to do with OBL's ultimate demise, it would have been better for national unity and Obama's own political fortunes if he had gone out of his way to thank 43. His invitation to Bush to join the event Thursday at Ground Zero (an offer declined) was the right idea, but belated. (Watch "President Obama on the Death of bin Laden.")
3. Letting the photo debate get out of control: The decision about whether to release images of a dead bin Laden is not an easy one. But the administration's conflicting statements and public agonizing has created an extended distraction. The White House has stumbled by violating one of Washington's iron rules: when something becomes famous inside the Beltway for not being released, the pressure from the media to release it becomes unrelenting.
4. Letting the debate about the war in Afghanistan get out of control: There are signs that some of the president's advisers are looking to scale back the commitment in Afghanistan sooner rather than later. But by failing to go on the offensive in defining and defending whatever policy the President wants to pursue, the White House has allowed those pressing for an end of the war to use bin Laden's death as rhetorical leverage. (See pictures of Osama bin Laden's life of terror.)
5. Letting the debate about Pakistan get out of control: The congressional and media demand for a radical change in America's relationship with Pakistan is burning like wildfire. The administration knows that a shift in policy is complicated and compromising, and not necessarily in the United States' interest. Stoking the problem: executive branch officials, publicly and privately, are expressing incredulity that the Pakistanis were unaware bin Laden was hiding in plain sight in their country. There should be and will be a debate about all this, but the administration's actions and inactions is making it less likely it will be on their terms.
====
Bin Laden again unites, then divides, US and Europe
05 May 2011 05:49
Source: reuters // Reuters
* Between Europe and America, again a gulf over bin Laden
* Common sense of relief, but Europeans fret over killing
* Cultural differences and contrasting views of future risks
(Adds Handelsblatt editor, paragraphs 19-20)
By Alastair Macdonald
LONDON, May 5 (Reuters) - When Osama bin Laden's men flew airliners into New York's World Trade Center 10 years ago, they sparked an outpouring of solidarity from Europe, captured by a French newspaper under the headline "We are all Americans now".
It didn't last. A decade of wars has followed that strained old alliances -- few in Paris will forget the U.S. jibes about "cheese-eating surrender monkeys". And now bin Laden's death, unarmed, at the hands of American troops has brought a new wave of contrasting emotional responses across the Atlantic.
Jubilant Americans poured into Times Square to chant "USA, USA, USA!" and hit the Internet to snap up T-shirts reading "We Got Him" and "Hey Osama, Tell Hitler We Said Hello."
Europeans, also targeted by al Qaeda, kept satisfaction more contained, even if tabloid headlines -- "Bin Bagged" and the like -- were no less triumphant than in the United States. And, crucially, not a few began to question the legality and morality of the killing and the risk of revenge attacks.
That attitude has simply outraged many Americans.
When Tony Metcalf, the British editor-in-chief of the Metro newspapers in the United States, ran a Reuters story on European qualms over what a former German chancellor called a breach of international law, "we knew it would cause a reaction".
Writing on his blog on Wednesday, Metcalf said: "Given the celebrations around the U.S. on Sunday evening, the objections from France, Germany, Spain and parts of the U.K. came as no surprise, and fitted neatly into many Americans' view of Europeans as a bunch of, well, cheese-eating surrender monkeys."
A glance at Metro's online comment thread shows near unanimity among the paper's American readers on the European criticism: "Arrogant, smug, thoughtless and thankless people," wrote LisaC -- in one of the less vitriolic posts.
SHARE VALUES, DIFFERING OUTLOOKS
Undaunted, Metcalf continued in his editorial blog to explain how Europeans admire American commitment to shared values of democracy and the rule of law but are anxious that U.S. policy, particularly toward the Muslim world, risks harming those values and creating problems for the future.
"Democratic states do not execute people without first going through the judicial process," he wrote. "If that process is circumvented, then you are no better than the terrorists.
"Is that harsh? Should I, a European, be sent back across the pond with mockery in my ears? You probably think so.
"But I defy you to argue with that logic." Across the ocean, Americans living in Europe were also aware of the gulf in perceptions.
Bernhard Warner, a social media entrepreneur and freelance journalist working in Rome, said European friends compared the sight of Americans
"dancing in the street at the death of someone" to the very scenes of jubilation from the Middle East after 9/11 that drew cries of barbarity from the United States:
"I have family and friends back home who are euphoric and I have family and friends in Europe who don't understand the euphoria," Warner said. "It's really incongruous to Europeans ... There's a sense of being appalled."
Californian Daniel Leraul, who works in Spain for a non-governmental organisation, said: "My European friends ... are very cynical about it. They don't agree with Obama's statement that justice was done ... I've heard stories of people dancing in the streets and I found that a bit much."
AMERICAN MARS, EUROPEAN VENUS
There is no shortage of comment in Europe that would be at home in the U.S. media. Recalling the 2001 attacks on the United States and 2005 bombings in London, Britain's best-selling Sun headlined: "Bin Laden Unarmed -- Just like his 9/11 and 7/7 victims". Its sister paper the New York Post brought news of the killing under the title "Got Him! Vengeance at Last". Writing in Germany's top-selling Bild, commentator Joerg Quoos said of critics of centre-right Chancellor Angela Merkel, who welcomed the killing of bin Laden: "What chance did Osama's killers give the people in the World Trade Center, who were incinerated, atomised or jumped in panic from 100 floors up?"
And in the country's business newspaper Handelsblatt, editor Gabor Steingart wrote: "Should we enjoy the murder of a human being? The short answer is: No. The somewhat longer answer: In this case, yes, because the violent death of Osama bin Laden is connected to hope. One death possibly helps prevent many.
"American success excites and shames us Europeans. A continent that is equal to the population and economic power of the United States has not seen the will to defend itself, its values and its prosperity. The majority of Europeans, since the Germans are not alone, refuse to accept the central insights of this now 10-year struggle against international terrorism: This war is not the same kind of war we know from our history books."
The extent of questioning in Europe has been in marked contrast to the United States, a feature some put down to broad cultural differences, others to differing understandings between of what bin Laden's killing may bring.
The European affairs correspondent of Britain's Economist weekly, writing in a blog, recalled a famous phrase from a 2002 research paper that highlighted Europe's hesitation to join in U.S. military interventions after the Sept. 11 attacks -- "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus".
The columnist noted contrasting responses among journalists to news of bin Laden's death: "In Brussels ... reporters repeatedly tried to get the (EU) Commission spokeswoman ... to denounce the raid as either an extrajudicial killing or an affront to Europe's opposition to the death penalty.
"In Washington, by contrast, many wanted ... the White House counter-terrorism adviser to give the technicolour detail of the raid in Abbbotabad ... Plainly, Americans and Europeans (or at least their journalists) still inhabit different planets."
FEARS OF ATTACK
In Rome, journalist Bernhard Warner said he understood the importance his fellow Americans attached to "bringing back the scalp" of bin Laden after years of frustration: "The thing for Americans is the feeling they've got the job done," he said.
On the other hand, "Europeans clearly understand that things are much more complicated than that."
Hall Gardner, professor of international politics at the American University of Paris, said the key difference was not in antipathy to bin Laden -- that is shared -- but in how different the future looked from Times Square or the Champs-Elysees.
"It is often forgotten ... that the French were the first to support the United States in the UN Security Council to engage in military action in Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks .... commanded by bin Laden," Gardner said. "The French newspaper Le Monde proclaimed, 'We are all Americans now!'
"Almost 10 years later the French, just like the Americans, are relieved, if not elated, that bin Laden has finally been killed. Yet the difference lies in the general pessimism that pervades France. The French do not believe that the death of bin Laden will ... lead to an end to the global war on terrorism...
"They fear new plots and attacks, like the one that killed French citizens in Marrakesh last week, and a real possibility that bin Laden's followers may be planning a major attack."
(Additional reporting by Fiona Ortiz in Madrid; editing by Tim Pearce)
===
U.S. insists firefight at bin Laden compound; won't release photos
05 May 2011 07:45
Source: reuters // Reuters
* Scepticism over U.S. official account of raid
* Obama says pictures could threaten national security
* U.S. says killing bin Laden was national self-defense
* U.S. vows to find out if Pakistan sheltered bin Laden
* Pakistan blames worldwide intelligence failure (Updates, adds media report)
WASHINGTON/ABBOTTABAD, May 5 (Reuters) - U.S. officials sought to keep a lid on growing scepticism over Washington's version of events around Osama bin Laden's death, insisting the al Qaeda leader was killed during a firefight in the compound in Pakistan where he was hiding.
The White House has cited the "fog of war" as a reason for initial misinformation on whether bin Laden -- who was shot in the head -- was armed when U.S. Navy Seals raided his compound in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad early on Monday.
Citing U.S. officials, NBC reported on Wednesday that four of the five people killed in the operation, including bin Laden, were unarmed and never fired a shot -- an account that differs from the administration's original assertions the commandos engaged in a prolonged firefight.
The New York Times quoted administration officials as saying the only shots fired by those in the compound came at the start of the raid when bin Laden's courier fired from a guesthouse adjacent to the building where the al Qaeda leader was holed up.
U.S. President Barack Obama resisted pressure from aides to release photographs of bin Laden's body, saying the images could incite violence and be used by militants as a propaganda tool.[ID:nN04233284]
"I think that given the graphic nature of these photos, it would create some national security risk," Obama told the CBS programme "60 Minutes."
"There's no doubt that bin Laden is dead," Obama added. "And so we don't think that a photograph in and of itself is going to make any difference. There are going be some folks who deny it. The fact of the matter is, you will not see bin Laden walking on this earth again."
Photographs acquired by Reuters and taken about an hour after the assault show three dead men -- not including bin Laden -- lying in pools of blood. No weapons could be seen in the closely cropped images.
The photos, taken by a Pakistani security official who was in the compound after the raid, show two men dressed in traditional Pakistani garb and one in a T-shirt, blood streaming from their ears, noses and mouths. [ID:nSGE743015]
"I know for a fact that shots were exchanged during this operation," said one Pentagon official. [ID:nN04152384]
Attorney General Eric Holder, dismissing suggestions that killing the unarmed bin Laden was illegal, said the U.S. commandos who raided his hide-out had acted in national self-defence.
U.S. Representative Adam Smith, speaking to reporters after a briefing by senior intelligence and defence officials, said the U.S. assault team did come under fire.
"They came in at night. It was dark. There were people moving around. They were fired at by, I think more than one person," Smith said. "There were weapons in the area. It was a fast-moving situation in which they felt threatened and they responded accordingly."
DEBATE OVER PHOTOS, BURIAL
U.S. acknowledgment that bin Laden was unarmed when shot dead had raised accusations, especially in Europe but also the Middle East, that Washington had breached international law.
There has been little questioning of the operation in the United States, where bin Laden's killing was greeted with street celebrations. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday showed the killing had boosted Obama's image, improving Americans' views of his leadership and efforts to fight terrorism. [ID:nN0387379]
Some Muslim leaders have expressed more concern about the nature of his burial at sea from a U.S. carrier.
Though U.S. officials say the correct Islamic rites were followed, several religious leaders said it was against Islamic practice to bury at sea someone killed on land.
There has been no sign of mass protests or violent reaction on the streets in Muslim countries, including Pakistan.
However, a major Islamist political party in Pakistan called for mass protests on Friday against what it called a violation of the country's sovereignty after the U.S. raid.
Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) also urged the government to withdraw its support for the U.S. war on militancy.
"We have appealed to everyone to hold peaceful demonstrations on Friday on a very large scale," JI chief Syed Munawar Hasan told Reuters.
Attorney General Holder said bin Laden was a legitimate military target and had made no attempt to surrender to the American forces who stormed his fortified compound near Islamabad and shot him in the head.
"It was justified as an act of national self-defence," Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee, citing bin Laden's admission of being involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people.
He said a trove of information seized from the compound would likely lead to more names being added to U.S. terrorism watch-lists.
PAKISTAN FACES NATIONAL EMBARRASSMENT
Pakistan, for its part, faces national embarrassment, a leading Islamabad newspaper said, in explaining how the world's most-wanted man was able to live for years in the military garrison town of Abbottabad, just north of the capital.
The Dawn newspaper compared the latest humiliation with the admission in 2004 that one of the country's top scientists, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had sold its nuclear secrets.
Pakistan has welcomed bin Laden's death, but expressed deep concerns about the raid, which it called an "unauthorised unilateral action".
The country has blamed worldwide intelligence lapses for a failure to detect bin Laden. But Washington is investigating whether its ally had sheltered the al Qaeda leader, which Islamabad vehemently denies.
"There is an intelligence failure of the whole world, not just Pakistan alone," Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani told reporters in Paris.
In a sign of the potential for the issue to further strain relations, U.S. lawmakers are debating whether they should attach more strings to the billions of dollars in aid they give Pakistan, or cut off Islamabad.
Some lawmakers are demanding a halt to the aid after the al Qaeda leader was found on Pakistani soil, but others say Washington needs Pakistan as a partner to fight terrorism and in its war in Afghanistan. (Additional reporting by Reuters bureaux worldwide; Writing by Jonathan Thatcher; Editing by John Chalmers)
====
U.S. insists firefight at bin Laden compound; won't release photos
05 May 2011 07:45
Source: reuters // Reuters
* Scepticism over U.S. official account of raid
* Obama says pictures could threaten national security
* U.S. says killing bin Laden was national self-defense
* U.S. vows to find out if Pakistan sheltered bin Laden
* Pakistan blames worldwide intelligence failure
(Updates, adds media report)
WASHINGTON/ABBOTTABAD, May 5 (Reuters) - U.S. officials sought to keep a lid on growing scepticism over Washington's version of events around Osama bin Laden's death, insisting the al Qaeda leader was killed during a firefight in the compound in Pakistan where he was hiding.
The White House has cited the "fog of war" as a reason for initial misinformation on whether bin Laden -- who was shot in the head -- was armed when U.S. Navy Seals raided his compound in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad early on Monday.
Citing U.S. officials, NBC reported on Wednesday that four of the five people killed in the operation, including bin Laden, were unarmed and never fired a shot -- an account that differs from the administration's original assertions the commandos engaged in a prolonged firefight.
The New York Times quoted administration officials as saying the only shots fired by those in the compound came at the start of the raid when bin Laden's courier fired from a guesthouse adjacent to the building where the al Qaeda leader was holed up.
U.S. President Barack Obama resisted pressure from aides to release photographs of bin Laden's body, saying the images could incite violence and be used by militants as a propaganda tool.[ID:nN04233284]
"I think that given the graphic nature of these photos, it would create some national security risk," Obama told the CBS programme "60 Minutes."
"There's no doubt that bin Laden is dead," Obama added. "And so we don't think that a photograph in and of itself is going to make any difference. There are going be some folks who deny it. The fact of the matter is, you will not see bin Laden walking on this earth again."
Photographs acquired by Reuters and taken about an hour after the assault show three dead men -- not including bin Laden -- lying in pools of blood. No weapons could be seen in the closely cropped images.
The photos, taken by a Pakistani security official who was in the compound after the raid, show two men dressed in traditional Pakistani garb and one in a T-shirt, blood streaming from their ears, noses and mouths. [ID:nSGE743015]
"I know for a fact that shots were exchanged during this operation," said one Pentagon official.[ID:nN04152384]
Attorney General Eric Holder, dismissing suggestions that killing the unarmed bin Laden was illegal, said the U.S. commandos who raided his hide-out had acted in national self-defence.
U.S. Representative Adam Smith, speaking to reporters after a briefing by senior intelligence and defence officials, said the U.S. assault team did come under fire.
"They came in at night. It was dark. There were people moving around. They were fired at by, I think more than one person," Smith said. "There were weapons in the area. It was a fast-moving situation in which they felt threatened and they responded accordingly."
DEBATE OVER PHOTOS, BURIAL
U.S. acknowledgment that bin Laden was unarmed when shot dead had raised accusations, especially in Europe but also the Middle East, that Washington had breached international law.
There has been little questioning of the operation in the United States, where bin Laden's killing was greeted with street celebrations. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday showed the killing had boosted Obama's image, improving Americans' views of his leadership and efforts to fight terrorism. [ID:nN0387379]
Some Muslim leaders have expressed more concern about the nature of his burial at sea from a U.S. carrier.
Though U.S. officials say the correct Islamic rites were followed, several religious leaders said it was against Islamic practice to bury at sea someone killed on land.
There has been no sign of mass protests or violent reaction on the streets in Muslim countries, including Pakistan.
However, a major Islamist political party in Pakistan called for mass protests on Friday against what it called a violation of the country's sovereignty after the U.S. raid.
Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) also urged the government to withdraw its support for the U.S. war on militancy.
"We have appealed to everyone to hold peaceful demonstrations on Friday on a very large scale," JI chief Syed Munawar Hasan told Reuters.
Attorney General Holder said bin Laden was a legitimate military target and had made no attempt to surrender to the American forces who stormed his fortified compound near Islamabad and shot him in the head.
"It was justified as an act of national self-defence," Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee, citing bin Laden's admission of being involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people.
He said a trove of information seized from the compound would likely lead to more names being added to U.S. terrorism watch-lists.
PAKISTAN FACES NATIONAL EMBARRASSMENT
Pakistan, for its part, faces national embarrassment, a leading Islamabad newspaper said, in explaining how the world's most-wanted man was able to live for years in the military garrison town of Abbottabad, just north of the capital.
The Dawn newspaper compared the latest humiliation with the admission in 2004 that one of the country's top scientists, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had sold its nuclear secrets.
Pakistan has welcomed bin Laden's death, but expressed deep concerns about the raid, which it called an "unauthorised unilateral action".
The country has blamed worldwide intelligence lapses for a failure to detect bin Laden. But Washington is investigating whether its ally had sheltered the al Qaeda leader, which Islamabad vehemently denies.
"There is an intelligence failure of the whole world, not just Pakistan alone," Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani told reporters in Paris.
In a sign of the potential for the issue to further strain relations, U.S. lawmakers are debating whether they should attach more strings to the billions of dollars in aid they give Pakistan, or cut off Islamabad.
Some lawmakers are demanding a halt to the aid after the al Qaeda leader was found on Pakistani soil, but others say Washington needs Pakistan as a partner to fight terrorism and in its war in Afghanistan. (Additional reporting by Reuters bureaux worldwide; Writing by Jonathan Thatcher; Editing by John Chalmers)
===
Obama thanks NYC firefighters, to visit Ground Zero
05 May 2011 16:35
Source: reuters // Reuters
* Obama in New York visits firefighters
* Obama to lay wreath at Ground Zero, meet 9/11 families
By Michelle Nichols and Mark Egan
NEW YORK, May 5 (Reuters) - Days after the killing of Osama bin Laden, U.S. President Barack Obama met New York firefighters on Thursday before a visit to Ground Zero to offer comfort to a city still scarred by the Sept. 11 attacks.
His predecessor George W. Bush, just three days after hijacked planes destroyed the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, stood bullhorn in hand with those clearing the still-smoldering wreckage to declare: "The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."
Almost a decade later, in a bookend to that historic visit, Obama came to New York to say that promise had been kept.
Obama visited the Engine 54 firehouse in Midtown Manhattan, which lost 15 members in the attacks, before heading to Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan to lay a wreath and meet with victims' families.
Obama shook hands with firefighters and told them, "I wanted to just come here to thank you."
"This is a symbolic site of the extraordinary sacrifice that was made on that terrible day almost 10 years ago."
He said the killing of bin Laden, "sent a message around the world, but also sent a message here back home, that when we say we will never forget, we mean what we say."
"It didn't matter who was in charge, we were going to make sure that the perpetrators of that horrible act -- that they received justice," Obama said.
Bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader who masterminded the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, was shot in the head by U.S. forces who stormed his compound in Pakistan on Monday after a decade-long manhunt.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed when al Qaeda hijackers crashed commercial planes into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., and a Pennsylvania field.
"A VICTORY LAP"
"It's a good thing he is coming to visit," said Al Fiammetta, 57, a safety engineer from Bellport, New York, who said he worked at Ground Zero clearing debris and waited to see Obama. "We have been waiting for this for 10 years. It puts a little more American pride in people."
New York City resident Caroline Epner, 32 and seven months pregnant, said, "It's OK for him to take a victory lap."
Briefing reporters on Air Force One, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Obama's visit recognized the terrible loss sustained by the city on 9/11 and would allow, "New Yorkers and Americans everywhere to achieve a sense of closure."
September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows urged Obama to now close the U.S. military prison housing foreign terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and bring home American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"May the wreath you lay today, at the grave site of our loved ones, be more than a symbolic gesture," the group said in a statement. "Accomplish a new mission by bringing our troops home now ... (and) by closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay."
Most Americans believe the threat of extremist attacks against the United States was likely to increase following the death of the al Qaeda leader, several recent polls have found.
The killing of bin Laden coincided with the first anniversary of a failed attempt to bomb New York's Times Square, one of at least 11 plots against the city that have been disrupted in the past decade.
Several recent polls showed Obama's job approval rating had been boosted after bin Laden's death although such bounces are often short lived, especially in the face of a difficult economy for many Americans.
Obama's popularity had been hurt by economic woes and high gasoline prices. Voters are expected to focus again on domestic concerns crucial to his 2012 re-election prospects. (Additional reporting by Jeff Mason, writing by Mark Egan, editing by Eric Beech)
====
CIA watched bin Laden from nearby safe house inside Pakistan
06 May 2011 04:15
Source: reuters // Reuters
* CIA watched bin Laden from Abbottabad safehouse, newspaper says
* Report likely to anger, embarrass Pakistan, further strain ties
* Pakistan threatens to halt cooperation if U.S. conducts more raids
* Obama visits Ground Zero, says made good on promise to get bin Laden
By Augustine Anthony and Michelle Nichols
ABBOTTABAD/NEW YORK, May 6 (Reuters) - Extensive surveillance of Osama bin Laden's hideout from a nearby CIA safe house in Abbottabad led to his killing in a Navy SEALs operation, U.S. officials said, a revelation likely to further embarrass Pakistan's spy agency and strain ties.
The U.S. officials, quoted by the Washington Post on Friday, said the safe house was the base for an intelligence-gathering operation that began after bin Laden's compound was discovered last August, and which was so exhaustive that the CIA asked Congress to reallocate tens of millions of dollars to fund it.
"The CIA's job was to find and fix," the Post quoted one U.S. official as saying. "The intelligence work was as complete as it was going to be, and it was the military's turn to finish the target."
U.S. officials told the New York Times that intelligence gathered from computer files and documents seized at his compound showed that bin Laden had for years directly orchestrated al Qaeda attacks from the Pakistani town.
The fact that bin Laden was found in a garrison town -- his compound was a stone's throw away from a major military academy -- has embarrassed Pakistan and the covert raid by U.S. commandos that led to his killing has angered its military.
On Thursday, the Pakistan army threatened to halt counter-terrorism cooperation with the United States, if it conducted another, similar unilateral strike.
A major Islamist party in Pakistan, Jamaat-e-Islami, called for mass protests on Friday against what it called a violation of sovereignty by the U.S. raid. It also urged the government to end support for U.S. battles against militants. [ID:nL3E7G50FI]
A senior Pakistani security official also charged that U.S. troops had killed the unarmed al Qaeda leader in "cold blood".
The criticism from Pakistan is likely to fray a relationship that Washington deems vital to defeating the al Qaeda movement that bin Laden led and winning its war in neighboring Afghanistan. [ID:nL3E7G51PT]
A U.S. acknowledgment that bin Laden was unarmed when shot in the head -- as well as the sea burial of his body, a rare practice in Islam -- have also drawn criticism in the Arab world and Europe, where some have warned of a backlash.
Few Americans appear to have any qualms about how bin Laden was killed, and on Thursday, scores of people cheered President Barack Obama during a visit to New York's Ground Zero, site of the twin towers al Qaeda levelled on Sept. 11, 2001, to comfort a city still scarred by attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Obama said the killing of bin Laden "sent a message around the world, but also sent a message here back home, that when we say we will never forget, we mean what we say." [ID:nN0549344]
FRAYED TIES
Friction between Washington and Pakistan has focused on the role of Pakistan's top security service, the ISI or Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate.
Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir denied Pakistani forces or the ISI aided al Qaeda. "The critique of the ISI is not only unwarranted, it cannot be validated," he said.
Lobbyists for Pakistan in Washington have launched an intense campaign on Capitol Hill to counter accusations that Islamabad deliberately gave refuge to bin Laden. [ID:nN05222916]
But many Americans are questioning how the al Qaeda leader could live for years in a Pakistani town teeming with military personnel, 50 km (31 miles) from the capital, Islamabad. Two U.S. lawmakers have also complained about the billions in U.S. civilian and military aid to impoverished Pakistan.
Seeking to repair ties, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Rome on Thursday that Washington was still anxious to maintain its alliance with Islamabad.
The Pakistani army and spy agency have supplied intelligence to the United States, arrested al Qaeda figures and taken on militants in areas bordering Afghanistan.
"It is not always an easy relationship," Clinton said. "But, on the other hand, it is a productive one for both our countries and we are going to continue to cooperate between our governments, our militaries, our law-enforcement agencies."
But Pakistan's army, facing rare criticism at home over the U.S. operation, warned the United States it would risk this cooperation if it conducted another assault.
Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Kayani "made it clear that any similar action violating the sovereignty of Pakistan will warrant a review on the level of military/intelligence cooperation with the United States", the army said.
It was unclear if such attacks included drone strikes which the U.S. military regularly conducts against militants along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. Pakistan has denied harbouring any members of al Qaeda.
The army also said it would conduct an investigation into failures by its intelligence to detect the world's most wanted man in its own backyard.
CIA SURVEILLANCE
The CIA had spent several months monitoring bin Laden's hideout, watching and photographing residents and visitors from a rented house nearby, according to U.S. officials quoted in the New York Times and Washington Post.
Observing from behind mirrored glass, CIA officers used cameras with telephoto lenses and infrared imaging equipment to study the compound, and they used sensitive eavesdropping equipment to try to pick up voices from inside the house and to intercept cellphone calls, the New York Times said. A satellite used radar to search for possible escape tunnels.
The U.S. administration has refused to be drawn on details on the raid, but, in a further sign of fractious relations between the allies, senior Pakistani security officials told Reuters that U.S. accounts had been misleading.
In Washington, people familiar with the latest U.S. government reporting on the raid told Reuters on Thursday that only one of four principal targets shot to death by U.S. commandos was involved in any hostile fire.
As the elite Navy SEALs moved in on a guest house inside bin Laden's compound, they were met with fire and shot a man in the guest house. He proved to be Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, an al Qaeda courier U.S. intelligence agencies had long been tracking.
The commandos then entered the main residence, where they killed another courier and a son of bin Laden, the sources said. They finally shot and killed the al Qaeda leader in a top-floor room after having earlier fired at him as he poked his head out of a door or over a balcony.
U.S. officials originally spoke of a 40-minute firefight. The White House has blamed the "fog of war" for the changing accounts.
Obama visited New York to say he had made good on a 10-year-old promise by his predecessor, George W. Bush, who declared at the smouldering wreckage of the World Trade Center three days after the Sept. 11 attacks, "The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."
"We have been waiting for this for 10 years. It puts a little more American pride in people," said Al Fiammetta, 57, a safety engineer who said he had cleared debris at Ground Zero.
Obama signalled in an interview with the CBS television program "60 Minutes" that bin Laden's death confirmed his commitment to begin drawing down troops in Afghanistan in July. "We don't need to have a perpetual footprint of the size that we have now," he said in a published excerpt. (Additional reporting by Reuters bureaux worldwide; Writing by Miral Fahmy; Editing by John Chalmers)
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====
Doctored bin Laden corpse photos go viral, global
AP
Osama killing will embarrass authorities: Pakistani media Reuters – During a search and destroy mission in the Zhawar Kili area, U.S. Navy SEALs (SEa, Air, Land) found valuable …
By MARCUS WOHLSEN, Associated Press Marcus Wohlsen, Associated Press – Wed May 4, 7:12 pm ET
SAN FRANCISCO – The images are bloody, grotesque and convincing: Osama bin Laden lies dead, the left side of his head blasted away. But the pictures are fakes.
Doctored photos purporting to show bin Laden's corpse rocketed around the world on television, online via social media and in print almost as soon as his death was announced.
The pictures have spread without regard for their origin or whether the images are real. Meanwhile, scammers have piggybacked on the popularity of the images and spiked supposed online links with computer viruses.
Newsrooms and the public have been left in the tough spot of deciding what to believe when software has made doctoring photographs easier than ever. And the hunger for visual evidence of bin Laden's death may only grow now that President Barack Obama has said the government's photos will remain classified.
"I don't think society tolerates the invisible anymore," said Fred Ritchin, a professor of photography at New York University who has written about digital technology undermining trust in the veracity of photographs. "Everything has to be imaged."
The photos on the Internet did not come from the operation that killed bin Laden, according to a senior defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the mission was classified.
Still, the appetite for images remains. In perhaps the most widely distributed photo, a bloodied bin Laden appears to be missing his left eye, and he is grimacing as if he died in pain. The White House says bin Laden was shot above his left eye.
Reuters reported on its photography blog that the mouth, ear and beard in the picture exactly matched a photo the news agency had snapped of bin Laden at a news conference in 1998. The upper half of the face appears to be from a different corpse.
Another photo released on the website liveleak.com shows bin Laden lying on his back with a wound over one eye as a soldier with an American flag insignia on his shoulder stands over the body. The photo is in green and black, as if taken with a night vision lens.
The website has since retracted the photo, which liveleak.com indicated was made with a photo of bin Laden digitally stitched into a still from the 2001 movie Black Hawk Down.
Another picture, by far the most gruesome, shows an extremely bloody face that resembles bin Laden with most of the skull missing and brain visible.
The spread of fake photos and the ease of making them have forced news organizations to be more vigilant than ever.
"The challenge here is these techniques are quite sophisticated," said Santiago Lyon, director of photography for The Associated Press. "A good Photoshop forger ... can make it very difficult at first glance to detect whether an image has been manipulated or not."
Experienced photo editors can often spot telltale inconsistencies such as shifts in color, contrast or light source that signal a fake, Lyon said.
For the most newsworthy photos that also raise suspicions, the AP has access to software that can analyze photos down to the level of the pixel, the basic building block of all digital images.
At least as important as the image itself is vetting the credibility of its source, Lyon said.
The AP did not escape from the lightning spread of doctored photos. The news service pulled from its wires a total of six photos — one of a Pakistani television broadcast, three of an Afghan television broadcast and two of a Bulgarian newspaper — that included the doctored images of bin Laden's corpse.
The AP made the decision not to accompany this story with any photos claiming to show a dead bin Laden to avoid any appearance of vouching for their authenticity.
The photos have caused headaches for more than just news organizations.
Viruses are being spread by links on Facebook pages, which have become home to a brisk trade in conspiracy theories.
While some politicians have criticized Obama's decision not to release the actual photos, visitors to a Facebook page called "Osama Bin Laden NOT DEAD" claim the doctored images themselves are evidence of a cover-up.
Some commentators on the page, which as of Wednesday had more than 1,300 fans, claimed without evidence that the U.S. government itself released the doctored photos. They claimed the faked photos were proof the Obama administration had fabricated the news of bin Laden's death.
"The immediate assumption is that you can fabricate any image," Ritchin said. "The photograph itself doesn't have the legitimacy that it used to have in our society."
___
Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.
=====
Al Qaeda confirms bin Laden death, vows revenge
06 May 2011 12:47
Source: reuters // Reuters
(Adds quotes from al Qaeda statement)
WASHINGTON, May 6 (Reuters) - Al Qaeda confirmed the death Osama bin Laden on Friday in an Internet message that vowed revenge on the United States and its allies, including Pakistan, according to the SITE monitoring service.
Five days after President Barack Obama announced bin Laden's death in a U.S. raid in Pakistan, al Qaeda vowed not to deviate from the path of armed struggle and said bin Laden's blood "is more precious to us and to every Muslim than to be wasted in vain."
"It (bin Laden's blood) will remain, with permission from Allah the Almighty, a curse that chases the Americans and their agents, and goes after them inside and outside their countries," the militant network said in a statement released on Islamist Internet forums and translated by SITE.
"Their happiness will turn into sorrow, and their blood will be mixed with their tears," al Qaeda said.
"We call upon our Muslim people in Pakistan, on whose land Sheikh Osama was killed, to rise up and revolt to cleanse this shame that has been attached to them by a clique of traitors and thieves ... and in general to cleanse their country from the filth of the Americans who spread corruption in it." (Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Eric Beech)
====
Bin Laden's wife spent 5 years in Pakistani house
Muthahida Shehri Mahaz burn representation of a U. S. flag during a …
* Osama Bin Laden's Compound Slideshow:Osama Bin Laden's Compound
* Raw Video: Protest against bin Laden killing Play Video Video:Raw Video: Protest against bin Laden killing AP
* Pakistan denies Al-Qaeda collusion Play Video Video:Pakistan denies Al-Qaeda collusion AFP
By MUNIR AHMED, Associated Press Munir Ahmed, Associated Press – Fri May 6, 11:22 am ET
ISLAMABAD – One of three wives living with Osama bin Laden told Pakistani interrogators she had been staying in the al-Qaida chief's hideout for five years, and could be a key source of information about how he avoided capture for so long, a Pakistani intelligence official said Friday.
In its first confirmation of bin Laden's death, al-Qaida warned of retaliation in an Internet statement, saying Americans' "happiness will turn to sadness."
Bin Laden's wife, identified as Yemeni-born Amal Ahmed Abdullfattah, said she never left the upper floors of the house the entire time she was there.
She and bin Laden's other two wives are being interrogated in Pakistan after they were taken into custody following Monday's American raid on bin Laden's compound in the town of Abbottabad. Pakistani authorities are also holding eight or nine children who were found there after the U.S. commandos left.
Given shifting and incomplete accounts from U.S. officials about what happened during the raid, testimony from bin Laden's wives may be significant in unveiling details about the operation.
Their accounts could also help show how bin Laden spent his time and managed to stay hidden, living in a large house close to a military academy in a garrison town, a two-and-a-half hours' drive from the capital, Islamabad.
The Pakistani official said CIA officers had not been given access to the women in custody. Already tense military and intelligence relations between the United States and Pakistan have been further strained after the helicopter-borne raid, which many Pakistanis see as a violation of their country's sovereignty.
The proximity of bin Laden's hideout to the military garrison and the Pakistani capital has also raised suspicions in Washington that bin Laden may have been protected by Pakistani security forces while on the run.
Click image to see photos of the compound where bin Laden was killed
Reuters/Stringer
Risking more tensions, missiles fired from a U.S. drone killed 15 people, including foreign militants, in North Waziristan, an al-Qaida and Taliban hotspot close to Afghanistan, Pakistani officials said. Such attacks were routine last year, but their frequency has dropped this year amid opposition by the Pakistani security establishment.
Pakistan's army, a key U.S. ally in the Afghanistan war, on Thursday threatened to review cooperation with Washington if it stages anymore attacks like the one that killed bin Laden.
The Pakistani intelligence official did not say Friday whether the Yemeni wife has said that bin Laden was also living there since 2006. "We are still getting information from them," he said.
Another security official said the wife was shot in the leg during the operation and did not witness her husband being killed. He also said one of bin Laden's eldest daughters had said she witnessed the Americans killing her father.
Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to give their names to the media.
Meanwhile, Pakistan's intelligence agency has concluded that bin Laden was "cash strapped" in his final days, according to a briefing given by two senior military officials. Disputes over money between the terror leader and his No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, led al-Qaida to split into two factions five or six years ago, with the larger faction controlled by al-Zawahri, they said.
The officers spoke to a small group of Pakistani reporters late Thursday. Their comments were confirmed for The Associated Press by the same security official who spoke about the shooting of bin Laden's wife and who was present at Thursday's briefing.
The officer didn't provide details or elaborate on how his agency made the conclusions about bin Laden's financial situation or the split with his deputy, al-Zawahri. The al-Qaida chief apparently had lived without any guards at the Abbottabad compound or loyalists nearby to take up arms in his defense.
The image of Pakistan's intelligence agency has been battered at home and abroad in the wake of the raid that killed bin Laden. Portraying him as isolated and weak could be aimed at trying to create an impression that a failure to spot him was not so important.
Documents taken from the house by American commandos showed that bin Laden was planning to hit America, however, including a plan for derailing an American train on the upcoming 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The confiscated materials reveal the rail attack was planned as of February 2010.
Late Thursday, two Pakistani officials cited bin Laden's wives and children as saying he and his associates had not offered any "significant resistance" when the American commandos entered the compound, in part because the assailants had thrown "stun bombs" that disorientated them.
One official said Pakistani authorities found an AK-47 and a pistol in the house belonging to those inside, with evidence that one bullet had been fired from the rifle.
"That was the level of resistance" they put up, said the official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
His account is roughly consistent with the most recent one given by U.S. officials, who now say only one of the five people killed in the raid was armed and fired any shots, a striking departure from the intense and prolonged firefight described earlier by the White House and others in the administration.
U.S. officials say four men were killed alongside bin Laden, including one of his sons.
Reflecting the anger in Pakistan, hundreds of members of radical Islamic parties protested Friday in several Pakistan cities against the American raid and in favor of bin Laden. Many of the people chanted "Osama is alive" and blasted the U.S. for violating the country's sovereignty.
The largest rally took place in the town of Khuchlak in southwestern Baluchistan province, where about 500 people attended.
"America is celebrating Osama bin Laden's killing, but it will be a temporary celebration," said Abdullah Sittar Chishti, a member of the Jamiat Ulema Islam party who attended the rally in Khuchlak. "After the martyrdom of Osama, billions, trillions of Osamas will be born."
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Associated Press writer Rasool Dawar in Peshawar contributed to this report.
(This version CORRECTS that bin Laden's wife lived in house for five years).)
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Iran claims Osama died of illness long before US raid
Published: May 9, 2011
Iranian intelligence minister says Iran has reliable information that Bin Laden died of an illness before the raid. PHOTO: AFP
TEHRAN: Iranian media on Sunday reported that Iran refuted US claims that al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was killed by US special forces in an operation in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad last Sunday.
Refuting the official version given by the US administration, Iran’s Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi said that Iran has reliable information that Bin Laden died of illness some time ago.
“If the US military and intelligence apparatus have really arrested or killed bin Laden, why don’t they show him (his dead body) why have they thrown his corpse into the sea?” Moslehi asked.
He said the White House was seeking to “overshadow a regional awakening” by releasing such news.
US President Barack Obama had announced that al Qaeda kingpin Bin Laden was killed in an operation by special US forces in his hideout in Abbottabad on May 1. His body was quickly buried at sea and the US has refused to release pictures creating much controversy as many continue to question the veracity of the US claim.
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Pakistan may let U.S. question bin Laden wives
10 May 2011 06:28
Source: reuters // Reuters
* Pakistani official says no decision on request to question wives
* CIA station chief will not be withdrawn
* Pakistani government fraces U.S., domestic pressure
By Kamran Haider and Mark Hosenball
WASHINGTON/ISLAMABAD, May 10 (Reuters) - Pakistan may let U.S. investigators question the wives of Osama bin Laden, a U.S. official said, a decision that could begin to stabilise relations between the prickly allies that have been severely strained by the killing of the al Qaeda leader.
However, a senior Pakistani government official in Islamabad said on Tuesday no decision had been taken on the U.S. request.
Bin Laden was shot dead on May 2 in a top-secret raid in the northern Pakistani town of Abbottabad to the embarrassment of Pakistan which has for years denied the world's most wanted man was on its soil.
The government is under pressure to explain how the al Qaeda leader was found in the garrison town, a short distance from the main military academy, and faces criticism at home over the perceived violation of sovereignty by the U.S. commando team.
Pakistani cooperation is crucial to combating Islamist militants and to bringing stability to Afghanistan and the U.S. administration has been keen to contain the fallout.
U.S. investigators, who have been sifting through a huge stash of material seized in bin Laden's high-walled compound, want to question his three wives as they seek to trace his movements and roll up his global militant network.
"The Pakistanis now appear willing to grant access. Hopefully they'll carry through on the signals they're sending," a U.S. official familiar with the matter said in Washington.
There was no immediate comment from the White House.
A Pakistani government official denied that permission for the U.S. questioning of the women had been given, saying local investigators had yet to finish their inquiry.
"It's too early to even think about it," said the official, referring to the U.S. request to question the women.
Pakistan says the three wives, one from Yemen and two from Saudi Arabia, and their children, will be repatriated and Pakistan was making contacts with their countries but they had yet to say they would take them, the official said.
Bin Laden's discovery has deepened suspicion that Pakistan's pervasive Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, which has a long history of contacts with militants, may have had ties with the al Qaeda leader, or that some of its agents did.
U.S. legislators have been asking tough questions, with some calling for a cut in billions of dollars of U.S. aid to the nuclear-armed Muslim country.
But the United States has stopped short of accusing Pakistan of providing shelter to bin Laden.
"We believe it is very important to maintain a cooperative relationship with Pakistan, precisely because it's in our national security interests to do so," White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Monday.
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Western governments had no alternative to cooperating with Pakistan in the fight against Islamic militants.
"If we are to assure long-term peace and stability in Afghanistan and beyond, then we need positive engagement with Pakistan," Rasmussen told the World Affairs Council in Atlanta on Monday. [ID:nN09252413]
"ABSURD"
Pakistani-U.S. relations were already at a low ebb after a string of diplomatic disputes over issues including a big attack by a U.S. drone aircraft in March and CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who shot dead two Pakistanis in January.
Potentially stirring tension further, a Pakistani TV channel and a newspaper have published what they said was the name of the undercover CIA station chief in Islamabad.
U.S. officials said the name disclosed in Pakistani media was wrong and the station chief would remain at his post.
They said they believe the leak was a calculated attempt to divert attention from U.S. demands for explanations of how bin Laden could have hidden for years in Pakistan. [ID:nN09261353]
Last year, after the chief of the Pakistani ISI was named in a U.S. civil case over attacks on the Indian city of Mumbai, the then-head of the CIA's Islamabad station was named by Pakistani media and forced to leave the country.
Pakistan Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, in his first major address since bin Laden's killing, rejected suggestions of incompetence or even complicity in hiding the al Qaeda leader.
"Allegations of complicity or incompetence are absurd," Gilani told parliament on Monday, saying it was disingenuous for anyone to accuse Pakistan of "being in cahoots" with al Qaeda.
U.S. President Barack Obama said on Sunday that bin Laden likely had "some sort" of a support network inside Pakistan, but added it would take investigations by Pakistan and the United States to find out the nature of that support.
Pakistan's main opposition party has called on Gilani and President Asif Ali Zardari to resign over the breach of sovereignty by U.S. special forces who slipped in from Afghanistan on helicopters to storm the bin Laden compound. (Editing by Robert Birsel and Jonathan Thatcher)
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U.S. warned Pakistan it would come to get bin Laden
10 May 2011 22:00
Source: reuters // Reuters
* Sources say message was given to top Pakistani officials
* Former US official says agreement was not put in writing
* US-Pakistani ties strained following bin Laden's death
By Mark Hosenball
WASHINGTON, May 10 (Reuters) - The United States repeatedly told Pakistan that Washington would send American forces into that country if it had evidence that Osama bin Laden was hiding there, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The message that the United States would not hesitate to send American operatives into Pakistan to get bin Laden was transmitted to top Pakistani officials on multiple occasions by the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, said a U.S. national security official who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information.
A former senior U.S. counter-terrorism official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was an "understanding" between Washington and Islamabad that amounted to an acknowledgment by Pakistani authorities that the United States would take unilateral action on Pakistani soil if it had intelligence on the al Qaeda leader's whereabouts.
The current U.S. official said the message that the United States would dispatch forces to go after bin Laden if it found him in Pakistan was repeatedly passed on to Pakistani authorities so that, at a minimum, Islamabad should have had no illusions about the U.S. position.
The already-strained relations between Pakistan and the United States became even more tense following the U.S. commando raid this month that killed bin Laden at a compound near Pakistan's principal military academy.
On Monday, Britain's Guardian newspaper, in a report from Islamabad, said the United States and Pakistan nearly a decade ago "struck a secret deal" in which Pakistan would allow American forces to conduct a raid inside Pakistan in search of bin Laden, his deputy or al Qaeda operational commanders.
The Guardian said that as part of the agreement Pakistan would vociferously protest in public any such U.S. incursion. The newspaper said the pact was struck between Bush and General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military leader at the time.
Dawn, a leading Pakistani newspaper, quoted a spokesman for Musharraf as saying the former leader denied striking any agreement with the United States regarding operations to capture or kill bin Laden.
Musharraf spokesman Fawad Chaudhry told the newspaper that claims of such a deal were baseless and no written or verbal agreement existed between Bush and Musharraf about what the United States would do if it found bin Laden in Pakistan.
The former U.S. official said that while he believed Pakistan was well aware of U.S. intentions, to his knowledge whatever understanding was reached between Washington and Islamabad was never put in writing.
(Editing by Will Dunham)
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EXCLUSIVE-Father of bin Laden's wife rebuffed union at first
15 May 2011 15:57
Source: reuters // Reuters
* Amal Abdul-Fattah married bin Laden at 18, before 9/11
* Father says family do not support bin Laden or al Qaeda
By Mohammed Ghobari
SANAA, May 15 (Reuters) - The Yemeni father of Osama bin Laden's youngest wife, wounded in a U.S. raid that killed the al Qaeda leader, said he initially rebuffed a matchmaker's proposal that his daughter marry bin Laden, before blessing their union.
Ahmed Abdul-Fattah al-Saada said they were married in 1999, well before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, and that all he knew about bin Laden's politics then was that he had backed insurgents fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
Saada told Reuters it took several requests before he allowed his daughter Amal, one of 17 children, to travel to Afghanistan to marry bin Laden when she was 18 years old and he was in his early 40s.
"My daughter was Osama bin Laden's wife, nothing more, and she had no relation to the al Qaeda organisation. I am confident of her innocence," he told Reuters in an interview in his modest one-storey home in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, adding that he would like to see her returned home from Pakistan.
"We are not in favour of bin Laden's actions and the al Qaeda organisation. We believe in coexistence between people."
Yemen, bin Laden's ancestral homeland, is home to an active regional arm of al Qaeda that claimed responsibility for a foiled 2009 attempt to blow up a U.S.-bound plane. It was also blamed for bombs found in cargo en route to the U.S. in 2010.
Militants bombed the U.S. Navy warship Cole in the port of Aden in 2000. Two years later an al Qaeda attack damaged the French supertanker Limburg in the Gulf of Aden.
Many of those who trained in al Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks came from Yemen.
Saada said his daughter came into contact with bin Laden's circle as a teenager attending an Islamic religious school where she was a student of the wife of Rashad Mohammed Saeed, whom he described as an aide to the militant leader.
He said he did not receive any money from Saudi-born bin Laden for the marriage.
DAUGHTER CHOSEN BY TEACHER
"Rashad asked his wife to nominate a girl to marry bin Laden because he wanted a Yemeni wife. The teacher selected my daughter," he said, adding that the man initially told him a Pakistani businessman wanted his daughter's hand.
"I refused at first and insisted on knowing who this person was. After that they said that he was Osama bin Laden, from a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia," he added.
He later relented because his daughter backed the idea: "She stuck to her view and told me she wanted to marry him, and I have not imposed a husband on any of my daughters. So I agreed."
Saada said he had never met bin Laden in person and that his daughter travelled to Afghanistan for the wedding ceremony accompanied by her sister and brother-in-law, who had fought there, and her teacher. He said her travel companions stayed on for a month to make sure she was settling in well. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he lost all contact with his daughter, now 29, last speaking to her after the birth of her first child, a girl named Safia.
"We did not know until now where she was or how she was living or how many children she had," he said. "We had been planning for her mother and one of her brothers to visit her but the September events thwarted this plan."
U.S. authorities in Pakistan have interviewed three of bin Laden's widows, including Amal and two Saudi wives, but gathered little new information from them, U.S. officials said.
Amal was reported to have earlier told Pakistani interrogators the family had lived for five years in the compound where bin Laden was killed by U.S. special forces.
"We are not worried about the Americans interrogating her because she is just the wife of Osama bin Laden, and she and her children have no link to what he did. But I strongly reject handing to the American side this Yemeni citizen. She needs to return to her country."
Saada said his family had met the Yemeni foreign minister, who promised to help try to get his daughter and her children repatriated. Pakistan has said it will repatriate bin Laden's widows and their children. "When I go to the mosque at prayer time, I call on God to return her to us," Saada said. "I hope they are given the chance to return to Yemen to begin a new life far from violence and being pursued." (Additional reporting by Erika Solomon in Dubai; writing by Cynthia Johnston; editing by Andrew Roche)
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Al Qaeda names Adel as interim chief -- al Jazeera
18 May 2011 08:11
Source: reuters // Reuters
DUBAI, May 18 (Retuers) - Al Jazeera television said al Qaeda has appointed a temporary leader and a new head of operations following the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. commandos, citing its own correspondent on Wednesday.
It said in a brief news flash the Egyptian militant Saif al-Adel was named interim leader, while Mustafa al-Yemeni, whose nationality it did not give, would direct operations.
U.S. special forces shot dead Al Qaeda leader bin Laden in his hideout outside the capital of Pakistan earlier this month.
U.S. prosecutors say Adel is one of al Qaeda's leading military commanders and helped plan the bomb attacks against the the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998.
They also say he set up al Qaeda training camps in Sudan and Afghanistan in the 1990s.
An al Qaeda expert had said on Tuesday that Adel would likely not act as head of the organisation.
"This role that he has assumed is not as overall leader, but he is in charge in operational and military terms," said Noman Benotman, a former bin Laden asssociate who is now an analyst with Britain's Quilliam Foundation think tank. [ID:nLDE74G1H4]
Adel was believed to have fled to Iran after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, and was subsequently held under a form of house arrest there, according to some media reports.
Arab media reports said Iranian authorities released him from custody about a year ago, and he then moved back to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. Some analysts say Adel may have returned to Iran or Afghanistan in recent weeks.
(Reporting by Sara Anabtawi and Erika Solomon; editing by Cynthia Johnston and Mark Heinrich)
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