History > 2011 > USA > Terrorism (III)

White House Issues Guides

on Sept. 11 Observances

August 29, 2011
The Nerw York Times
By THOM SHANKER
and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — The White House has issued detailed guidelines to government officials on how to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, with instructions to honor the memory of those who died on American soil but also to recall that Al Qaeda and other extremist groups have since carried out attacks elsewhere in the world, from Mumbai to Manila.

The White House in recent days has quietly disseminated two sets of documents. One is framed for overseas allies and their citizens and was sent to American embassies and consulates around the globe. The other includes themes for Americans here and underscores the importance of national service and what the government has done to prevent another major attack in the United States. That single-page document was issued to all federal agencies, officials said.

After weeks of internal debate, White House officials adopted the communications documents to shape public events and official statements, and they sought to strike a delicate balance between messages designed for these two very important but very different audiences on a day when the world’s attention will be focused on President Obama, his leadership team and his nation.

The guidelines list what themes to underscore — and, just as important, what tone to set. Officials are instructed to memorialize those who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and thank those in the military, law enforcement, intelligence or homeland security for their contributions since.

“A chief goal of our communications is to present a positive, forward-looking narrative,” the foreign guidelines state.

Copies of the internal documents were provided to The New York Times by officials in several agencies involved in planning the anniversary commemorations. “The important theme is to show the world how much we realize that 9/11 — the attacks themselves and violent extremism writ large — is not ‘just about us,’ ” said one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal White House planning.

Some senior Obama administration leaders had advocated a lengthy program of speeches and events to mark the anniversary, but the final decision was for lower-key appearances by Mr. Obama and other senior leaders only on the days leading up to the anniversary and on Sept. 11 itself.

Mr. Obama in his weekly address on Saturday said that this year’s anniversary will be one of “service and remembrance.”

“We need to make sure we’re speaking to a very broad set of audiences who will be affected by the anniversary,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, said in a telephone interview on Friday.

That may be, but some American counterterrorism and intelligence officials are complaining that the White House missed out on tying together the 10th anniversary with recently announced strategies to combat terrorism and violent extremism into a more coherent, longer-term plan. “They don’t do that kind of long-term planning,” said a senior counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid disciplinary measures from the White House. Mr. Rhodes rejected that criticism, saying these themes have threaded through many of Mr. Obama’s speeches in recent months.

As the White House sharpens its messages for the commemorations, officials say they have also stepped up efforts to spot signs of foreign or domestic terrorist plots timed around the anniversary. So far, they said, they had not detected any specific plots or an increase in threats.

Officials interviewed at several federal departments said they would consult the White House guidelines, but had been given broad leeway to hold commemorative events at their agencies.

One significant new theme is in both sets of documents: Government officials are to warn that Americans must be prepared for another attack — and must, in response, be resilient in recovering from the loss.

“Resilience takes many forms, including the dedication and courage to move forward,” according to the guidelines for foreign audiences. “While we must never forget those who we lost, we must do more than simply remember them —we must sustain our resilience and remain united to prevent new attacks and new victims.”

At the same time, Obama administration officials caution that public commemorations here should not cast the United States as the sole victim of terrorism, an argument underscored by killings and maimings from extremist attacks overseas.

Some senior administration officials involved in the discussions noted that the tone set on this Sept. 11 should be shaped by a recognition that the outpouring of worldwide support for the United States in the weeks after the attacks turned to anger at some American policies adopted in the name of fighting terror — on detention, on interrogation, and the decision to invade Iraq.

So the guidelines aimed at foreign audiences also call on American officials to praise overseas partners and their citizens, who have joined the worldwide effort to combat violent extremism.

“As we commemorate the citizens of over 90 countries who perished in the 9/11 attacks, we honor all victims of terrorism, in every nation around the world,” the overseas guidelines state. “We honor and celebrate the resilience of individuals, families, and communities on every continent, whether in New York or Nairobi, Bali or Belfast, Mumbai or Manila, or Lahore or London.”

The death of Osama bin Laden was viewed as reason for officials to “minimize references to Al Qaeda.” While terrorists affiliated with Bin Laden’s network “still have the ability to inflict harm,” the guidelines say, officials are to make the point that “Al Qaeda and its adherents have become increasingly irrelevant.”

The guidelines say the absence of Al Qaeda playing any significant role in the “Arab Spring” uprisings against longtime autocrats in the Middle East and North Africa should be cited as evidence that Bin Laden’s organization “represents the past,” while peaceful street protesters in Egypt and Tunisia “represent the future.” Left unsaid was that many of the deposed leaders were close American allies and partners in counterterrorism operations.

Resilience is a repeated theme of the communications. “We celebrate the resilience of communities across the globe,” the foreign guidelines state.

Or, as Mr. Rhodes put it in the interview: “It’s a statement of strength that the United States can outlast our adversaries. We’re stronger than the terrorists’ ability to frighten us.”

The domestic guidelines, entitled “9/11 Anniversary Planning,” are shorter and less prescriptive than the talking points created for overseas audiences. For example, they note that the ceremonies will honor Americans killed in the Sept. 11 attacks but also “all victims of terrorism, including those who had been targeted by Al Qaeda and other groups around the globe.”

But these guidelines also acknowledge that Americans will expect government leaders to explain what steps have been taken to prevent another 9/11-style attack and to encourage Americans to volunteer in their communities this Sept. 11.

The domestic guidelines also ask something of Americans that has been lacking in Washington: “We will also draw on the spirit of unity that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.”

    White House Issues Guides on Sept. 11 Observances, NYT, 29.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/us/politics/30terror.html

C.I.A. Demands Cuts

in Book About 9/11

and Terror Fight

August 25, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — In what amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central Intelligence Agency is demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former F.B.I. agent who spent years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda.

The agent, Ali H. Soufan, argues in the book that the C.I.A. missed a chance to derail the 2001 plot by withholding from the F.B.I. information about two future 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego, according to several people who have read the manuscript. And he gives a detailed, firsthand account of the C.I.A.’s move toward brutal treatment in its interrogations, saying the harsh methods used on the agency’s first important captive, Abu Zubaydah, were unnecessary and counterproductive.

Neither critique of the C.I.A. is new. In fact, some of the information that the agency argues is classified, according to two people who have seen the correspondence between the F.B.I. and C.I.A., has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.

Mr. Soufan, an Arabic-speaking counterterrorism agent who played a central role in most major terrorism investigations between 1997 and 2005, has told colleagues he believes the cuts are intended not to protect national security but to prevent him from recounting episodes that in his view reflect badly on the C.I.A.

Some of the scores of cuts demanded by the C.I.A. from Mr. Soufan’s book, “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda,” seem hard to explain on security grounds.

Among them, according to the people who have seen the correspondence, is a phrase from Mr. Soufan’s 2009 testimony at a Senate hearing, freely available both as video and transcript on the Web. Also chopped are references to the word “station” to describe the C.I.A.’s overseas offices, common parlance for decades.

The agency removed the pronouns “I” and “me” from a chapter in which Mr. Soufan describes his widely reported role in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an important terrorist facilitator and training camp boss. And agency officials took out references to the fact that a passport photo of one of the 9/11 hijackers who later lived in San Diego, Khalid al-Midhar, had been sent to the C.I.A. in January 2000 — an episode described both in the 9/11 commission report and Mr. Tenet’s book.

In a letter sent Aug. 19 to the F.B.I.’s general counsel, Valerie E. Caproni, a lawyer for Mr. Soufan, David N. Kelley, wrote that “credible sources have told Mr. Soufan that the agency has made a decision that this book should not be published because it will prove embarrassing to the agency.”

In a statement, Mr. Soufan called the C.I.A’s redactions to his book “ridiculous” but said he thought he would prevail in getting them restored for a later edition.

He said he believed that counterterrorism officers have an obligation to face squarely “where we made mistakes and let the American people down.” He added: “It saddens me that some are refusing to address past mistakes.”

A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said, “The suggestion that the Central Intelligence Agency has requested redactions on this publication because it doesn’t like the content is ridiculous. The C.I.A.’s pre-publication review process looks solely at the issue of whether information is classified.”

She noted that under the law, “Just because something is in the public domain doesn’t mean it’s been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government.”

A spokesman for the F.B.I., Michael P. Kortan, declined to comment.

The book, written with the assistance of Daniel Freedman, a colleague at Mr. Soufan’s New York security company, is scheduled to go on sale Sept. 12. Facing a deadline this week, the publisher, W. W. Norton and Company, decided to proceed with a first printing incorporating all the C.I.A.’s cuts.

If Mr. Soufan ultimately prevails in negotiations or a legal fight to get the excised material restored, Norton will print the unredacted version, said Drake McFeely, Norton’s president. “The C.I.A.’s redactions seem outrageous to me,” Mr. McFeely said. But he noted that they are concentrated in certain chapters and said “the book’s argument comes across clearly despite them.”

The regular appearance of memoirs by Bush administration officials has continued a debate over the facts surrounding the failure to prevent 9/11 and the tactics against terrorism that followed. In former Vice President Dick Cheney’s memoir, set for publication next week, he writes of the harsh interrogations that “the techniques worked.”

A book scheduled for publication next May by José A. Rodriguez Jr., a former senior C.I.A. official, is expected to give a far more laudatory account of the agency’s harsh interrogations than that of Mr. Soufan, as is evident from its tentative title: “Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.”

Government employees who hold security clearances are required to have their books vetted for classified information before publication. But because decisions on what should be classified can be highly subjective, the prepublication review process often becomes a battle. Several former spies have gone to court to fight redactions to their books, and the Defense Department spent nearly $50,000 last year to buy and destroy the entire first printing of an intelligence officer’s book, which it said contained secrets.

The C.I.A. interrogation program sharply divided the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., whose director, Robert S. Mueller III, ordered agents to stop participating in the program after Mr. Soufan and other agents objected to the use of physical coercion. But some C.I.A. officers, too, opposed the brutal methods, including waterboarding, and it was their complaint to the C.I.A.’s inspector general that eventually led to the suspension of the program.

“The Black Banners” traces the origins and growth of Al Qaeda and describes the role of Mr. Soufan, 40, a Lebanese-American, in the investigations of the East African embassy bombings of 1998, the attack on the American destroyer Cole in 2000, 9/11 and the continuing campaign against terrorism.

Starting in May, F.B.I. officials reviewed Mr. Soufan’s 600-page manuscript, asking the author for evidence that dozens of names and facts were not classified. Mr. Soufan and Mr. Freedman agreed to change wording or substitute aliases for some names, and on July 12 the bureau told Mr. Soufan its review was complete.

In the meantime, however, the bureau had given the book to the C.I.A. Its reviewers responded this month with 78-page and 103-page faxes listing their cuts.

    C.I.A. Demands Cuts in Book About 9/11 and Terror Fight, NYT, 25.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/us/26agent.html

Counting the cost of the 9/11 wars

The global conflicts that have raged since 9/11
have seen no clear winners but many losers
– at least 250,000 people have been killed

Monday 22 August 2011
19.59 BST
Guardian.co.uk
Jason Burke
This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 19.59 BST on Monday 22 August 2011. A version appeared on p6 of the G2 section of the Guardian on Tuesday 23 August 2011. It was last modified at 00.05 BST on Tuesday 23 August 2011.

If, just over a decade ago, you had looked north through binoculars from frontline Taliban positions 30 miles north of Kabul, you would have seen an old Soviet-built airbase, little more than a cluster of ruined buildings, rusting metal stakes, a single battered jeep and no serviceable aircraft at all on the scarred strip of concrete shimmering in the Afghan sun. The group of scruffy Taliban fighters in filthy clothes who manned the makeshift trenches on the heights above it would probably have served grapes and tea to you as they did to the rare reporters who visited them.

If you had come back just a little later, say in the spring of 2002, you would have seen a startling difference. With the Taliban apparently defeated, the airstrip had become the fulcrum of a build-up of American and other international forces in the country that would continue inexorably over the next years. The feverish activity of the bulldozers, tents, jets and helicopters gave a sense that something extraordinary was happening. But its exact nature was still very unclear. Now, after a decade of conflict, a base the size of a small town has sprung up around the airstrip.

No soldiers at the battle of Castillon in 1453 knew they were fighting in the last major engagement of the hundred years war. No one fighting at Waterloo could have known they were taking part in what turned out to be the ultimate confrontation of the Napoleonic wars. The first world war was the great war until the second world war came along. Perhaps inevitably, then, the ongoing, interlinked and overlapping conflicts that have raged across the globe during the 10 years since 9/11 are currently without a name. In decades or centuries to come historians will no doubt find one – or several, as is usually the case. In the interim, given the one event that, in the western public consciousness at least, saw hostilities commence, "the 9/11 wars" seems an apt working title.

Al-Qaida has failed to achieve most of its key aims: there has been no global uprising of Muslim populations, no establishment of a new caliphate. Nor have changes in America's policy in the Islamic world been those desired by men such as the late Osama bin Laden. Does this mean the west has won the 9/11 wars? It has certainly avoided defeat. The power of terrorism lies in its ability to create a sense of fear far in excess of the actual threat posed to an individual. Here, governments have largely protected their citizens, and few inhabitants of western democracies today pass their lives genuinely concerned about being harmed in a radical militant attack. In July 2010, President Obama even spoke of how the US could "absorb" another 9/11, a statement that would have been inconceivable a few years before.

Despite significant damage to civil liberties in both Europe and America, institutional checks and balances appear to have worked on both sides of the Atlantic. In the face of a worrying militarisation and a commensurate growth in its offshoot, the "security" business, other forces have been strong enough to ensure that liberal democratic societies have kept their values more or less intact. The integration of minorities, always a delicate task, is generating significant tensions but is proceeding, albeit unevenly.

Even though now facing serious problems of debt, America has nonetheless been able to pay for the grotesque strategic error of the war in Iraq, at a total cost of up to a trillion dollars depending on how it is calculated, and a 10-year conflict in Afghanistan, all while financing a huge security industry at home. In 2009, American military expenditure was $661bn (£400bn), considerably more than double the total of 10 years previously, but still not enough, as Bin Laden had hoped, to fundamentally weaken the world's only true superpower. In Europe, supposedly creaking old democracies have reacted with a nimbleness and rapidity that few imagined they still possessed to counter domestic and international threats.

In short, western societies and political systems appear likely to digest this latest wave of radical violence as they have digested its predecessors. In 1911, British police reported that leftist and anarchist groups had "grown in number and size" and were "hardier than ever, now that the terrifying weapons created by modern science are available to them". The world was "threatened by forces which would be able to one day carry out its total destruction," the police warned. In the event, of course, it was gas, machine guns and artillery followed by disease that killed millions, not terrorism.

In the second decade of the 9/11 wars other gathering threats to the global commonwealth, such as climate change, will further oblige Islamic radical militants to cede much of the limelight, at least in the absence of a new, equally spectacular cycle of violence.

But if there has been no defeat for the west then there has been no victory either. Over the past 10 years, the limits of the ability of the US and its western allies to impose their will on parts of the world have been very publicly revealed. Though it is going too far to say that the first decade of the 9/11 wars saw the moment where the long decline of first Europe and perhaps America was made clear, the conflict certainly reinforced the sense that the tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting. After its military and diplomatic checks in Iraq and Afghanistan, a chastened Britain may well have to finally renounce its inflated self-image as a power that "punches above its weight". The role of Nato in the 21st century is unclear. Above all, though the power, soft and hard, cultural and economic, military and political, of the US and Europe remains immense and often hugely underestimated, it is clear that this will not always be the case.

For many decades, the conventional wisdom has been that economic development around the globe would render liberal democracy and free-market capitalism more popular. One of the lessons of the 9/11 wars is that this optimism was misplaced. A sense of national or religious chauvinism appears often to be a corollary of a society getting richer rather than its opposite, and the search for dignity and authenticity is often defined by opposition to what is seen, rightly or wrongly, as foreign. In some places, the errors of western policy-makers over recent years have provoked a reaction that will last a long time. The socially conservative, moderately Islamist and strongly nationalist narrative that is being consolidated in Muslim countries from Morocco to Malaysia will pose a growing challenge to the ability of the US and European nations to pursue their interests on the global stage for many years to come. This, alongside the increasingly strident voices of China and other emerging nations, means a long period of instability and competition is likely.

American intelligence agencies reported in their four-yearly review in late 2008 that they judged that within a few decades the US would no longer be able to "call the shots". Instead, they predicted, America is likely to face the challenges of a fragmented planet, where conflict over scarce resources is on the rise, poorly contained by "ramshackle" international institutions. The previous review, published in December 2004, when George Bush had just been re-elected and was preparing his triumphal second inauguration, had foreseen "continued dominance" for many years to come. The difference is stark. If the years from 2004 to 2008 brought victory, then America and the west cannot afford many more victories like it.

If clear winners in the 9/11 wars are difficult to find, then the losers are not hard to identify. They are the huge numbers of men, women and children who have found themselves caught in multiple crossfires: the victims of the 9/11 strikes or of the 7/7 and Madrid bombings, of sectarian killings in Baghdad, badly aimed American drone strikes in Pakistan or attacks by teenage suicide bombers on crowds in Afghanistan. They are those executed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaida in Iraq until his death in 2006; those who died, sprayed with bullets by US Marines, at Haditha; those shot by private contractors careering in overpowered unmarked blacked-out four-wheel-drive vehicles through Baghdad. They are worshippers at Sufi shrines in the Punjab, local reporters trying to record what was happening to their home towns, policemen who happened to be on shift at the wrong time in the wrong place, unsuspecting tourists on summer holidays. They are the refugees who ran out of money and froze to death one by one in an Afghan winter, those many hundreds executed as "spies" by the Taliban, those gunned down as they waited for trains home at Mumbai's main railway station one autumn evening, those who died in cells in Bagram or elsewhere at the hands of their jailers, the provocative film-maker stabbed on an Amsterdam street, all the victims of this chaotic matrix of confused but always lethal wars.

The cumulative total of dead and wounded in this conflict so far is substantial, even if any estimates are necessarily very approximate.

The military dead are the best documented. Though some may have shown genuine enthusiasm for war, or even evidence of sadism, many western soldiers did not enlist with the primary motive of fighting and killing others. A significant number came from poor towns in the midwest of America or council estates in the UK and had joined up for a job, for adventure, to pay their way through college, to learn a craft. By the end of November 2010, the total of American soldiers who had died in Operation Iraqi Freedom and its successor, Operation New Dawn, was 4,409 with 31,395 wounded. More than 300 servicemen from other nations had been killed too and many more maimed, disabled or psychologically injured for life. In Afghanistan, well over 2,000 soldiers from 48 different countries had been killed in the first nine years of the conflict. These included 1,300 Americans, 340 Britons, 153 Canadians, 43 Frenchmen and 44 Germans.

Military casualties among western nations – predominantly American – in other theatres of Operation Enduring Freedom, from the Sudan to the Seychelles and from Tajikistan to Turkey, added another 100 or so. At least 1,500 private contractors died in Iraq alone.

Then there were the casualties sustained by local security forces. Around 12,000 police were killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2010. In Afghanistan, the number of dead policemen since 2002 had exceeded 3,000 by the middle of 2010. Many might have been venal, brutal and corrupt, but almost every dead Afghan policeman left a widow and children in a land where bereavement leads often to destitution. In Pakistan, somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 policemen have died in bombing or shooting attacks. As for local military personnel in the various theatres of conflict, there were up to 8,000 Iraqi combat deaths in the 2003 war, and another 3,000 Iraqi soldiers are thought to have died over the subsequent years. In Afghanistan, Afghan National Army casualties were running at 2,820 in August 2010, while in Pakistan, around 3,000 soldiers have been killed and at least twice as many wounded in the various campaigns internally since 2001. Across the Middle East and further afield in the other theatres that had become part of the 9/11 wars, local security forces paid a heavy price too. More than 150 Lebanese soldiers were killed fighting against radical "al-Qaida-ist" militants in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon in 2007, for example. There were many others, in Saudi Arabia, in Algeria, in Indonesia. In all, adding these totals together, at least 40,000 or 50,000 soldiers and policemen have so far died.

Casualties among their enemies – the insurgents or the extremists – are clearly harder to establish. Successive western commanders said that they did not "do body counts", but most units kept a track of how many casualties they believed they had inflicted, and these totals were often high. At least 20,000 insurgents were probably killed in Iraq, roughly the same number in Pakistan, possibly more in Afghanistan. In all that makes at least 60,000, again many with wives and children.

Then, of course, there are those, neither insurgent nor soldier, neither terrorist nor policeman, who were caught in a war in which civilians were not just features of the "battle space" but very often targets. In 2001, there were the 9/11 attacks themselves, of course, with their near 3,000 dead. In 2002 alone, at least 1,000 people died in attacks organised or inspired by al-Qaida in Tunisia, Indonesia, Turkey and elsewhere.

The casualties from such strikes continued to mount through the middle years of the decade. One study estimates 3,013 dead in around 330 attacks between 2004 and 2008. By the end of the first 10 years of the 9/11 wars, the total of civilians killed in terrorist actions directly linked to the group, or to al-Qaida-affliated or inspired Islamic militants, was almost certainly in excess of 10,000, probably nearer 15,000, possibly up to 20,000. To this total must be added the cost to civilians of the central battles of the 9/11 wars. In Iraq generally, estimates vary, but a very conservative count puts violent civilian deaths (excluding police) from the eve of the invasion of 2003 to the end of 2010 at between 65,000 and 125,000. They included more than 400 assassinated Iraqi academics and almost 150 journalists killed on assignment. The true number may be many, many times greater. In Afghanistan, from 7 October 2001, the day the bombing started, to mid-October 2003, between 3,000 and 3,600 civilians were killed just by coalition air strikes. Many more have died in other "collateral damage" incidents or through the actions of insurgents. The toll has steadily risen. There were probably around 450 civilian casualties in 2005. From 2006 to 2010 between 7,000 and 9,000 civilian deaths were documented, depending on the source. In 2010 alone, more than 2,000 died. In all, between 11,000 and 14,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, and at least three or four times that number wounded or permanently disabled. In Pakistan, which saw the first deaths outside America of these multiple conflicts when police shot into demonstrations in September 2001, the number of casualties is estimated at around 9,000 dead and between 10,000 and 15,000 injured.

Add these admittedly rough figures together and you reach a total of well over 150,000 civilians killed. The approximate overall figure for civilian and military dead is probably near 250,000. If the injured are included – even at a conservative ratio of one to three – the total number of casualties reaches 750,000. This may be fewer than the losses inflicted on combatants and non-combatants during the murderous major conflicts of the 20th century but still constitutes a very large number of people. Add the bereaved and the displaced, let alone those who have been harmed through the indirect effects of the conflict, the infant mortality or malnutrition rates due to breakdown of basic services, and the scale of the violence that we have witnessed over the past 10 years is clear.

Some day the 9/11 wars will be remembered by another name. Most of the dead will not be remembered at all.

 

Extracted from The 9/11 Wars by Jason Burke, to be published by Allen Lane on 1 September at RRP £30.

    Counting the cost of the 9/11 wars, G, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/22/9-11-wars-war-on-terror

9/11’s White Elephant

August 19, 2011
The New York Times
By JOE NOCERA

There is nothing wrong — and much that is right — with building a national monument to memorialize the nearly 3,000 people killed in the 9/11 attacks a decade ago. The awful events of that day traumatized the country — and changed it. The dead deserve to be remembered. Far be it from me to suggest otherwise.

What I do want to suggest, though, is that what’s being built in the name of 9/11 — a staggering $11 billion worth of government-sponsored construction on the 16 acres we now call ground zero — is an example of just about everything wrong with modern government. When the World Trade Center site is finally completed, it will include a state-of-the-art train station whose cost overruns have surpassed $1 billion. The 9/11 memorial itself, which covers the footprint of the former twin towers, was so far behind schedule that it is now being hastily constructed, out of sequence, so that it will be ready by the 10th anniversary of the tragedy.

And then there’s 1 World Trade Center, scheduled to be completed in 2013, which will add 2.6 million square feet of office space in a city that doesn’t need it, at a cost so high that it will be a cash drain for decades to come. Where’s the Tea Party when you need them?

Last year, I wrote about 1 World Trade Center, pointing out that its $3.3 billion price tag made it, by far, the most expensive office building ever constructed in America. At the time, Richard Gladstone, the project manager for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is in charge of rebuilding ground zero, told me point-blank that despite its costs, the new skyscraper would not affect the commuters who pay the tolls to cross the six bridges and tunnels the agency operates.

But, on Friday, that statement was shown to be — how to put this nicely? — untrue. The Port Authority, with the complicity of Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie, the governors of New York and New Jersey, who oversee the agency, approved a series of toll increases so onerous that by 2015, a typical commuter who uses the George Washington Bridge will have to pay $62.50 a week to get to work.

What has been especially galling has been the cynicism surrounding the efforts to get the toll increases. First, the Port Authority said that unless it could increase the tolls, it would have to “slow or stop” the construction of 1 World Trade Center. Though this scenario was highly unlikely, it got the construction unions duly aroused, as it was intended to do. They began calling in favors among the politicians.

The Port Authority was originally going to propose two increases of $2, spaced a few years apart. But the politicos in both Cuomo’s and Christie’s offices suggested that the agency come forth with a much higher initial toll increase — thus allowing the two governors to look like heroes when they “persuaded” the Port Authority to lower the increases. The governors also railed on about waste and fraud at the Port Authority, while knowing full well the real problem was the fact that $3.3 billion — money that could have been spent on needed infrastructure improvements — was instead diverted to a white elephant at ground zero.

I understand that it’s hard, even for a blunt-talking fiscal conservative like Christie, to openly criticize 1 World Trade Center. For many people, its rebuilding has enormous symbolic importance. George Pataki, the former New York governor, who pushed hardest for the rebuilding, originally named the building Freedom Tower. Recent editorials in the New York tabloids objecting to the toll increases nevertheless tiptoed gingerly around the outrageous costs of 1 World Trade Center.

But despite the shroud of patriotism that its supporters have always cloaked it in, it’s really just a big, fancy office building. An office building with such poor economics that it will soak New Jersey and New York commuters for decades to come. An office building only the government could love.

Lately, supporters of the project have begun saying that its economics have improved. They point to the fact that Condé Nast, the publishing giant, has agreed to be the anchor tenant. What they fail to point out is that Condé Nast’s rent is less than half the break-even cost of the 1 million square feet it will occupy. In other words, a company that publishes high-end magazines aimed at rich people will be getting an enormous government subsidy for the foreseeable future.

And who will be paying for that subsidy? The mailroom attendants who use the Lincoln Tunnel to get to work. The middle-class New Jersey-ites who use the George Washington Bridge. The firefighters and police officers who live in Staten Island. Thus, in the name of 9/11, does New York and New Jersey place another economic burden on the already overburdened middle class. How sad.

    9/11’s White Elephant, NYT, 19.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/opinion/nocera-911s-white-elephant.html

Terrorism and the Law

July 16, 2011
The New York Times


The prosecution of a Somali national accused of supporting Al Qaeda is now headed for trial in a federal court, where it belonged all along. The Obama administration finally made the right decision over the usual self-serving objections of grandstanding senators from both parties. But it is troubling that the administration delayed this step for almost two months.

During those months, Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, who was seized by American forces in international waters, was secretly held in extralegal detention on a United States naval vessel. There, he was interrogated without being read the Miranda rights that apply to all federal criminal prosecutions. After weeks of military investigation, a separate team of law enforcement officials concluded that he was not a legitimate candidate for military detention and trial. They read him his rights. He promptly waived them and continued cooperating with his captors, but it may prove hard to disentangle those later statements, fully admissible in court, from his earlier, inadmissible ones.

Approving his secret interrogation at sea gave the administration a convenient alternative to sending him to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. That would have made trial in a civilian court nearly impossible, because Congress has inexcusably hamstrung the justice system by barring the use of funds to transfer prisoners from the detention camp.

Any suggestion that moving Mr. Warsame to civilian court shows weakness against terrorism is absurd. Had Mr. Warsame been brought before a military commission, prosecutors would have had to prove that he was either an actual member of Al Qaeda or was personally involved in plotting attacks on the United States. But Mr. Warsame is not accused of any actual terrorist acts, just “material support” of Al Qaeda and its alleged Somali affiliate, the Shabab. In a civilian court, proving material support for the Shabab alone would be enough to convict. Conviction on all counts of material support carries a possible life sentence.

So Mr. Warsame’s trial can proceed, but at an unfortunate cost. President Obama has created yet another parallel system of unlimited detention and interrogation without rights outside the constitutional norms that served us well for more than two centuries before the Bush administration carelessly and needlessly tossed them aside for terrorism cases after Sept. 11, 2001.

The Obama administration justifies its handling of the Warsame case under the laws of war. But Mr. Warsame was not picked up on any recognized battlefield. The administration claims continuing authority for military detention, interrogation and trial. This applies not just to battlefield detentions, where it is often appropriate, but to detentions anywhere, and not just to personal involvement in violent attacks, but to a broad range of offenses directly or indirectly related to terrorism. That is far too broad a claim.

Two important goals must guide terrorist-related cases — eliciting information to thwart future plots and punishing the guilty. The overwhelming evidence from the past decade is that both are most reliably served by lawful interrogation and prosecution in civilian courts.

Hundreds of accused terrorists have been convicted in civilian courts since 9/11. Only six — none of them major Qaeda figures — have been convicted in the military commissions carelessly confected by the Bush administration and renewed, with significantly stricter rules and procedures, by the Obama administration.

Mr. Obama came to office vowing to stop these costly travesties of justice that so damaged America’s international reputation. But he has steadily retreated, sometimes in the face of political opposition, sometimes on his own. Now he is drifting toward establishing his own system of extralegal detention and tainted questioning. It is time to stop that drift and return to a constitutional system of law enforcement.

    Terrorism and the Law, NYT, 16.7.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/opinion/sunday/17sun1.html

Bin Laden deputy Zawahri

takes over as Qaeda leader

DUBAI | Thu Jun 16, 2011
8:39am EDT
Reuters

DUBAI (Reuters) - Veteran militant Ayman al-Zawahri has taken command of al Qaeda after the killing of Osama bin Laden, an Islamist website said on Thursday, a move widely expected following his long years as second-in-command.

Bin Laden's lieutenant and the brains behind much of al Qaeda's strategy, Zawahri vowed this month to press ahead with al Qaeda's campaign against the United States and its allies.

"The general leadership of al Qaeda group, after the completion of consultation, announces that Sheikh Dr. Ayman Zawahri, may God give him success, has assumed responsibility for command of the group," the Islamist website Ansar al-Mujahideen (Followers of the Holy Warriors) said in a statement.

The bespectacled Zawahri had been seen as bin Laden's most likely successor after the man held responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington was shot dead by U.S. commandos in Pakistan 45 days ago.

His whereabouts are unknown, although he has long been thought to be hiding along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The United States is offering a $25 million reward for any information leading to his capture or conviction.

Former U.S, intelligence officer Robert Ayers said Zawahri was "a man lacking in charisma, a pale shadow of bin Laden."

"He's a grey bureaucrat, not a leader who can energize and rally the troops. The only thing his promotion will accomplish is to elevate his priority as a target for the U.S."

Sajjan Gohel of Asia-Pacific Foundation security consultants said Zawahri had been in practical charge of al Qaeda for many years, but lacked bin Laden's presence and his "ability to unite the different Arab factions within the group."

Others see a more accomplished figure.

London-based journalist Abdel-Bari Atwan, who interviewed bin Laden in 1996, said Zawahri was the "operational brains" behind al Qaeda and was respected in part because, he said, he had been bin Laden's chosen deputy.

"He managed to transform al Qaeda from being a small organization focused on expelling U.S. interests from Saudi Arabia into a global organization. The men he brought to al Qaeda from his own Egyptian Islamic Jihad group proved to be the instruments that drove al Qaeda's international push."

Believed to be in his late 50s, Zawahri met bin Laden in the mid-1980s when both were in Pakistan to support guerrillas fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Born to an upper-class Cairo family, Zawahri trained as a doctor and surgeon.

"A worthy successor to a great predecessor. We ask God to grant you and your soldiers success for the victory of Islam and Muslims and to raise the banner of religion," a contributor to another Islamist militant website, As-Ansar, said in a posting.

In a video message posted on the internet on June 8, Zawahri said al Qaeda would continue to fight.

"The Sheikh (bin Laden) has departed, may God have mercy on him, to his God as a martyr, and we must continue on his path of jihad to expel the invaders from the land of Muslims and to purify it from injustice," Zawahri said.

Zawahri called this year's Arab uprisings a disaster for Washington because, he said, they would remove Arab leaders who were the corrupt "agents of America."

He also pledged allegiance to the leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Omar, calling him "Emir of the Believers."

The pledge, which repeats one made by bin Laden in the 1990s, was seen by analysts as an attempt to shore up al Qaeda's alliance with the Taliban, which sheltered the Arab-led group until U.S. attacks on Afghanistan in 2001 ended Taliban rule.

Western powers have demanded the Taliban cut all ties with al Qaeda.

"Today, and thanks be to God, America is not facing an individual or a group ... but a rebelling nation which has awoken from its sleep in a jihadist renaissance challenging it wherever it is," Zawahri said.

Among some Egyptians there was disdain at the news.

Karim Sabet, 34, a director of an oil and gas startup firm, said he was not surprised by the announcement.

"He's been the loyal no. 2 forever. Zawahri seems even more of a mad man than Osama was, and he'll want to prove himself by going on the attack soon. Another devil killing in the name of Islam. Disgusting."

 

(Reporting by Sara Anabtawi, Isabel Coles and Cairo bureau, William Maclean in London; writing by Reed Stevenson; editing by Andrew Roche and Jan Harvey)

    Bin Laden deputy Zawahri takes over as Qaeda leader, R, 16.6.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/16/us-binladen-zawahri-idUSTRE75F18N20110616

Anti-Americanism rife in Pakistan army institution: Wikileaks

ISLAMABAD | Wed May 25, 2011
3:25am EDT
Reuters
By Zeeshan Haider

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Officers received training biased against the United States at a prestigious Pakistan army institution, according to Wikileaks, underscoring concerns that anti-Americanism in the country's powerful military is growing amid strains with Washington.

A U.S. diplomatic cable said the former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson found officers at the National Defense University (NDU) were "naive and biased" against the United States, a key ally which gives Pakistan billions of dollars of aid to help fight Islamist militants.

Fears the military could be harboring Islamist militant sympathizers have grown since U.S. forces found and killed Osama bin Laden this month in a Pakistani garrison town, where the al Qaeda leader had probably lived for several years.

Pakistan's military also controls the country's nuclear arms, and a series of attacks against military installations has heightened fears about the safety of these weapons.

"The elite of this crop of colonels and brigadiers are receiving biased NDU training with no chance to hear alternative views of the U.S.," the Wikileaks cable, which was published in the Dawn newspaper, quoted Patterson as saying.

"Given the bias of the instructors, we also believe it would be beneficial to initiate an exchange program for instructors."

Some of the officers believed the CIA was in charge of the U.S. media, the report said.

Anti-Americanism runs high among much of Pakistan's mainly Muslim population but it has deepened after bin Laden's killing in a secret U.S. raid which many Pakistanis see as breach of their sovereignty.

Patterson said the United States must target a "lost generation" of military officers who missed training programs in the United States after Washington slapped sanctions against Pakistan in the 1990s for its nuclear program.

The cables also documented the account of a U.S. army officer, Col. Michael Schleicher, who attended a course at NDU and corroborated the views expressed by Patterson.

"The senior level instructors had misperception about U.S. policies and culture and infused the lectures with these suspicions, while the students share these misconceptions with their superiors despite having children who attended universities in the U.S. or London," the cables quoted Schleicher as saying.

Hamayoun Khan, a teacher at NDU, however denied that anti-Americanism was being taught at the university.

"I haven't seen bias which she has mentioned here," he said.

Dawn said dozens of cables from U.S. embassies around the world also showed that the United States continued to intensely monitor Pakistan's nuclear and missiles programs.

In 2008, the U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. embassy in Ankara, Nancy McEldowney, detailed her discussions with Turkish authorities about the U.S. desire to see action taken against suspicious shipments to Pakistan.

U.S. officials, according to the cable, "urged the GOT (government of Turkey) to contact the governments of Japan and Panama to request the shipment be diverted to another port and returned the shipper."

Pakistan's nuclear program came under increasing international scrutiny after the 2004 confessions of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atom bomb, about his involvement in sales of nuclear secrets to Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

The government pardoned Khan but put him under house arrest. A court in 2009 ordered his release.

 

(Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Miral Fahmy)

    Anti-Americanism rife in Pakistan army institution: Wikileaks, R, 25.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/25/us-anti-americanism-rife-in-pakistan-arm-idUSTRE74O1EA20110525

Chilling Echoes From Sept. 11

May 22, 2011
The New York Times

As the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania draws near, one of the main recommendations of the 9/11 Commission remains unfulfilled: the creation of a common communications system that lets emergency responders talk to one another across jurisdictions.

The problem was laid bare in the tragic cacophony at the World Trade Center, where scores of firefighters perished as police and fire officials couldn’t communicate on antiquated radio systems before the second tower fell.

Four years later during Hurricane Katrina, emergency workers from across the nation faced the same dangerous problem. They had to resort to running handwritten notes to warn of shifting conditions.

Congress should be haunted by the threat of new disasters finding rescue workers still incommunicado. Responsible lawmakers can mark the 10th anniversary by passing legislation to finally create a national public safety communications network.

The overall challenge is more complex than it sounds, touching on questions of financing, broadcast spectrum fights, technology innovation and turf battles among local public safety agencies.

Congress can begin cutting through a lot of that by approving the reallocation of radio spectrum to wireless broadband providers and public safety agencies. This would allow creation of a modern emergency system providing common access when needed by voice, video and text for responders now using separate voice systems typically jammed up in emergencies.

Senator John Rockefeller IV, chairman of the science and transportation committee, is championing the commission’s dedicated spectrum approach, warning that the faulty emergency communication on 9/11 was “probably the greatest killer other than the planes themselves.” He has the support of the ranking Republican, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas.

Crucial details remain to be settled.

Would a nonprofit corporation best manage the new network? What’s the best way to get commercial broadcasters to yield needed spectrum — through incentive auctions proposed by the Obama administration?

Once Congress acts, this new generation of wireless broadband would require years of infrastructure construction. In the meantime, public safety and homeland security officials across the nation have been tapping into billions in federal aid designed to patch improvements into existing voice systems.

Critics warn there’s been too much reliance on buying hardware and not enough on planning and coordinating among fiefdoms still reluctant to come to terms on single useful systems. In New York, where the scars of 9/11 remain raw, there is not yet a fully compatible system among police officers, firefighters and Port Authority forces, but officials insist they are making progress.

How many warnings does Congress need? How many more people will be endangered because of bureaucratic wrangling or political inertia? “Further delay is intolerable,” the commission’s leaders, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, declared earlier this year. They are right.

    Chilling Echoes From Sept. 11, NYT, 22.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/opinion/23mon1.html

Malign Neglect

May 21, 2011
The New York Times

Extraordinary rendition — the abduction of foreigners, often innocent ones, by American agents who sent them to countries well known for torturing prisoners — was central to President George W. Bush’s antiterrorism policy. His administration then used wildly broad claims of state secrets to thwart any accountability for this immoral practice.

President Obama has adopted the same legal tactic of using the secrecy privilege to kill lawsuits. So the only hope was that the courts would not permit these widely known abuses of power to go unchecked.

Last Monday, the Supreme Court abdicated that duty. It declined to review a case brought by five individuals who say — credibly — that they were kidnapped and tortured in overseas prisons. The question was whether people injured by illegal interrogation and detention should be allowed their day in court or summarily tossed out.

The court’s choice is a major stain on American justice. By slamming its door on these victims without explanation, it removed the essential judicial block against the executive branch’s use of claims of secrecy to cover up misconduct that shocks the conscience. It has further diminished any hope of obtaining a definitive ruling that the government’s conduct was illegal — a vital step for repairing damage and preventing future abuses.

The lead plaintiff, an Ethiopian citizen and resident of Britain named Binyam Mohamed, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002. The C.I.A. turned him over to Moroccan interrogators, who subjected him to brutal treatment that he says included cutting his penis with a scalpel and then pouring a hot, stinging liquid on the open wound.

After the trial court gave in to the secrecy argument, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the case should proceed. It said the idea that the executive branch was entitled to have lawsuits shut down with a blanket claim of national security would “effectively cordon off all secret actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the C.I.A. and its partners from the demands and limits of the law.”

Last September, the full appeals court, ruling en banc, reversed that decision by a 6-to-5 vote. The dissenters noted that the basic facts of the plaintiffs’ renditions were already public knowledge. But the majority gave in to the pretzel logic shaped by the Bush administration that allowing the torture victims a chance to make their case in court using nonsecret evidence would risk divulging state secrets.

The Supreme Court allowed that nonsense to stand.

It is difficult to believe there are legitimate secrets regarding the plaintiffs’ ill treatment at this late date. Last year, a British court released secret files containing the assessment of British intelligence that the detention of Mr. Mohamed violated legal prohibitions against torture and cruel and degrading treatment.

The Supreme Court should have grabbed the case and used it to rein in the distorted use of the state secrets privilege, a court-created doctrine meant to shield sensitive evidence in actions against the government, not to dismiss cases before evidence is produced.

But this is not the first time the Supreme Court has abdicated its responsibility to hear cases involving national security questions of this sort. A year ago, the Supreme Court refused to consider the claims of Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian whom the Bush administration sent to Syria to be tortured. In 2007, the court could not muster the four votes needed to grant review in the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen subjected to torture in a secret overseas prison.

As President Obama’s first solicitor general, Justice Elena Kagan was in on the benighted decision to use overwrought secrecy claims to stop any hearing for torture victims. She properly recused herself from voting on the case. Surely among the eight remaining judges there was at least one sensitive to the gross violation of rights, and apparently law. We wish they would have at least offered a dissent or comment to let the world know that the court’s indifference was not unanimous.

Instead, what the world sees is rendition victims blocked from American courts while architects of their torment write books bragging about their role in this legal and moral travesty. Some torture victims bounced from American courts, including Mr. Mohamed and Mr. Arar, have received money from nations with comparatively minor involvement in their ordeals.

The Supreme Court’s action ends an important legal case, but not President Obama’s duty to acknowledge what occurred, and to come up with ways to compensate torture victims and advance accountability. It is hard, right now, to be optimistic.

    Malign Neglect, NYT, 21.5.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/opinion/22sun1.html

Bomb in Pakistan Hits US Vehicle;

1 Pakistani Dies

May 20, 2011
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — A roadside bomb exploded near a pair of U.S. consulate vehicles carrying Americans in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on Friday, killing a Pakistani passer-by and wounding several people including some of the passengers, officials said.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. In the wake of the May 2 U.S. raid that killed al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden elsewhere in Pakistan's northwest, militant groups such as the Pakistani Taliban have vowed revenge attacks including those targeting Americans in Pakistan.

U.S. Embassy spokesman Alberto Rodriguez said some of the Americans in the vehicle were only slightly wounded, and that only one of the automobiles was damaged during the attack. No high-ranking U.S. official was in the vehicles, which were making routine trips to and from the consulate.

Footage from the scene showed that the car apparently hit was a large, sport utility vehicle. It appeared to have veered into a pole and the hood was damaged. Senior police official Shafi Ullah said the vehicle was bulletproof. Nearby buildings also were damaged during the blast.

The U.S. Consulate in Peshawar is widely believed to be a front for CIA operations, and its employees have been targeted in the past. In August 2008, Lynne Tracy, then the top U.S. diplomat at the consulate, survived a gun attack on her armored vehicle.

Peshawar lies just outside Pakistan's tribal regions, where al-Qaida and the Taliban have long had hideouts. The city itself has witnessed numerous suicide and other bombings in recent years, including many that have killed security forces and ordinary civilians.

The bin Laden raid in the Pakistani garrison city of Abbottabad has badly soured Pakistan-U.S. relations.

Pakistan is angry it was not warned in advance that the Navy SEALs would storm the compound, and insists it had no idea the terror mastermind was hiding there. U.S. officials have visited Pakistan in recent days to try to patch up differences.

___

Toosi reported from Islamabad.

    Bomb in Pakistan Hits US Vehicle; 1 Pakistani Dies, NYT, 20.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/05/20/world/asia/AP-AS-Pakistan-Violence.html

Al Qaeda releases

posthumous bin Laden

audio recording

CAIRO | Thu May 19, 2011
12:09am EDT
Reuters
By Sami Aboudi

CAIRO (Reuters) - Al Qaeda released a posthumous audio recording by Osama bin Laden in which the Islamist group's leader praised revolutions sweeping the Arab world, and called for more "tyrants" to be toppled.

Islamists have often been conspicuous by their absence in the uprisings largely led by ordinary citizens angered by autocratic rule, corruption and economic mismanagement.

But bin Laden, who was killed in a U.S. raid on May 2 in Pakistan, backed the uprisings which began in Tunisia and have spread across much of North Africa and the Middle East, saying that the winds of change would envelope the entire Muslim world.

Al Qaeda had said bin Laden, who masterminded the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, recorded a message a week before his death. The audio was included in an Internet video lasting more than 12 minutes and posted on Islamist websites.

In the audio, a voice which appears to be bin Laden's referred to the uprisings which began in the Maghreb region of North Africa.

"The sun of the revolution has risen from the Maghreb. The light of the revolution came from Tunisia. It has given the nation tranquility and made the faces of the people happy."

 

WINDS OF CHANGE

Tunisia's president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was overthrown in January, followed by Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak after mass protests centered on Cairo's Tahrir Square.

Bin Laden backed efforts to topple more leaders in the Muslim world, calling on supporters to "set up an operations room that follows up events and works in parallel ... to save the people that are struggling to bring down their tyrants."

"I believe that the winds of change will envelope the entire Muslim world," he said. "The youth must prepare what is necessary and must not make any decision without consulting those of experience and honesty who avoid half solutions."

However, he made no specific reference to Libya, Syria and Yemen, where uprisings are underway. While denouncing Western hegemony, he did not mention the United States but said "the Jews have become scared" by the Arab revolutions.

"Tunisia was the first but swiftly the knights of Egypt have taken a spark from the free people of Tunisia to Tahrir Square," said bin Laden, adding: "It has made the rulers worried."

U.S. commandos killed bin Laden in a compound in Abbottabad, a garrison town near the Pakistani capital. The incident embarrassed Pakistan's military and spy agencies and led to calls by members of the U.S. Congress for a tougher approach toward the country.

Al Jazeera television, citing Pakistani security sources, said on Wednesday that al Qaeda had appointed Egyptian Saif al-Adel as temporary leader following bin Laden's death.

(Writing by David Stamp; Editing by Robert Birsel)

    Al Qaeda releases posthumous bin Laden audio recording, R, 19.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/19/us-binladen-audio-idUSTRE74I0DJ20110519

Afghan prisoner at Guantanamo

dies in apparent suicide

MIAMI | Wed May 18, 2011
10:47pm EDT
Reuters

MIAMI (Reuters) - An Afghan prisoner died at the Guantanamo detention center in a recreation yard in an apparent suicide, the U.S. military said Wednesday.

The prisoner, identified as Inayatullah, a 37-year-old accused of being a member of al Qaeda, was found dead by guards conducting routine checks at the facility.

"An investigation is under way to determine the exact circumstances of what happened," said Navy Commander Tamsen Reese, a spokeswoman at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba.

The U.S. military's Southern Command said guards "found the detainee unresponsive and not breathing," according to a statement. "After extensive lifesaving measures had been exhausted, the detainee was pronounced dead by a physician."

Inayatullah is the eighth prisoner to die at the detention center since the United States began sending foreign captives with suspected al Qaeda or Taliban links to Guantanamo Bay in January 2002.

Five others died of apparent suicides and two died of natural causes.

Inayatullah was one of the last captives sent to Guantanamo, where the last publicly announced detainee arrival was in March 2008.

The prison camp has held 779 foreign captives since the United States invaded Afghanistan to oust al Qaeda and its Taliban protectors following the September 11, 2001 attacks. It now holds 171.

In March, President Barack Obama lifted a two-year freeze on new military trials at Guantanamo Bay and suggested the U.S. Congress was hurting American national security by blocking his attempts to move some trials into U.S. civilian courts.

Obama had tried and failed to overcome objections by Republicans and some of his fellow Democrats in Congress to transfer some detainees to U.S. prisons.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service will conduct an investigation after an autopsy by a military pathologist, the military said. Inayatullah's body will then be prepared for repatriation.

In the statement, the military said Inayatullah admitted to being a planner for al Qaeda's terrorist operations and helped to coordinate documentation, accommodations and vehicles to smuggle al Qaeda fighters through Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Iraq.

Cuba has repeatedly criticized the Guantanamo base, saying it is an illegal enclave
on its territory.

 

(Reporting by Kevin Gray and Jane Sutton; Editing by Eric Walsh)

    Afghan prisoner at Guantanamo dies in apparent suicide, R, 18.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/19/us-usa-guantanamo-death-idUSTRE74I04I20110519

Al Qaeda names Adel as interim chief:

Al Jazeera

DUBAI | Wed May 18, 2011
1:49pm EDT
Reuters
By Sara Anabtawi

DUBAI (Reuters) - Al Qaeda has appointed an Egyptian militant as temporary leader and named a new head of operations following the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. commandos, al Jazeera said Wednesday, citing Pakistani security sources.

The Arab satellite channel said Saif al-Adel was named interim leader and Mohammed Mustafa al-Yemeni, whose surname hints he is from Yemen, would direct operations .

"According to the sources, the decision (on the appointments) was made at a meeting on May 10 on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border," said the channel, which was the main conduit for bin Laden to release messages to the media.

U.S. special forces shot dead Al Qaeda leader bin Laden in his hideout outside the capital of Pakistan on May 2, almost 10 years after he ordered the September 11 attacks of 2001 that killed around 3,000 people in the United States.

"I think it's more for show than anything else. It is to illustrate to the world that they have a temporary leader," Dubai-based security analyst Theodore Karasik said of Adel.

"Adel clearly has operational experience but he does not have the intellectual or charismatic side that bin Laden had."

Adnan al-Khairi al-Masri was named al Qaeda's general command head, while Mohammed Nasser al-Wahshi would be Africa chief, Mohammed Adam Khan, an Afghan, would be in charge in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Fahd al-Iraqi would be responsible for the Afghan-Pakistani border region, Al Jazeera added.

U.S. prosecutors say Adel is one of al Qaeda's leading military commanders and helped plan the 1998 bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. They also say he set up al Qaeda training camps in Sudan and Afghanistan in the 1990s.

But reports have suggested Adel viewed the September 11 attacks as a mistake and criticized bin Laden over them.

Mustafa Alani, a political analyst based in Dubai, said he doubted Adel had taken on a temporary leadership role, citing past disputes between Adel and the charismatic Saudi leader.

"This man was an opponent of bin Laden and the September 11 attacks. He criticized bin Laden personally, describing him as a dictator who took decisions without referring to his colleagues," he said.

Alani also said bin Laden was a symbolic leader who did not need to be replaced. "I am questioning the credibility of the need to replace him. Osama bin Laden is not a leader, he's an ideologist. The idea of replacing bin Laden as a manager, it doesn't work this way," he said.

IRANIAN SOJOURN

Adel was believed to have fled to Iran after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan following September 11 and was held under a form of house arrest there, according to some media reports.

Arab media reports said Iranian authorities let him go 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.

Noman Benotman, a former bin Laden associate who is now an analyst with Britain's Quilliam Foundation think-tank, said Adel was already a kind of "chief of staff" who took on the role to assuage concerns by al Qaeda activists about the group's future.

"This role that he has assumed is not as overall leader, but he is in charge in operational and military terms," he said on Tuesday, adding that Adel, who Benotman knew personally when both were active in Afghanistan, was on good terms with Ayman al-Zawahri, al Qaeda's number two figure.

"This has happened in response to the impatience displayed by jihadists online who have been extremely worried about the delay in announcing a successor," he told Reuters in London.

"It is hoped that now they will calm down. It also paves the way for Zawahri to take over."

Audio and video announcements from bin Laden largely dried up in recent years while Zawahri recorded frequent messages. But Zawahri is seen as lacking the charisma and oratorical skills of bin Laden, a Saudi of Yemeni origin.

Al Qaeda has an active wing in Yemen but has not managed to establish itself in Egypt, the most populous Arab nation.

 

(Additional reporting by Cynthia Johnston and Mahmoud Habboush in Dubai;
Writing by Cynthia Johnston and Andrew Hammond; Editing by Jon Hemming)

    Al Qaeda names Adel as interim chief: Al Jazeera, R, 18.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/18/us-qaeda-leaders-idUSTRE74H1HZ20110518

A Conflict Without End

May 16, 2011
The New York Times

Osama bin Laden had been dead only a few days when House Republicans began their efforts to expand, rather than contract, the war on terror. Not content with the president’s wide-ranging powers to pursue the archcriminals of Sept. 11, 2001, Republicans want to authorize the military to pursue virtually anyone suspected of terrorism, anywhere on earth, from now to the end of time.

This wildly expansive authorization would, in essence, make the war on terror a permanent and limitless aspect of life on earth, along with its huge potential for abuse.

The Authorization for Use of Military Force, approved by Congress a week after Sept. 11, 2001, gives the president the power to go after anyone who committed or aided in the 9/11 attacks, or who harbored such people, to prevent acts of terrorism. It was this document that authorized the war in Afghanistan and the raid on Bin Laden’s compound.

A new bill, approved last week by the House Armed Services Committee and heading for the floor this month, would go much further. It would allow military attacks against not just Al Qaeda and the Taliban but also any “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States.” That deliberately vague phrase could include anyone who doesn’t like America, even if they are not connected in any way with the 2001 attacks. It could even apply to domestic threats.

It allows the president to detain “belligerents” until the “termination of hostilities,” presumably at a camp like the one in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Since it does not give a plausible scenario of how those hostilities could be considered over, it raises the possibility of endless detention for anyone who gets on the wrong side of a future administration.

The bill, part of the National Defense Authorization Act, was introduced by the committee chairman, Howard McKeon of California, who said it simply aligns old legal authorities with current threats. We’ve heard that before, about wiretapping and torture, and it was always untrue.

These powers are not needed, for current threats, or any other threat. President Obama has not asked for them (though, unfortunately, the administration has used a similar definition of the enemy in legal papers). Under the existing powers, or perhaps ignoring them, President George W. Bush abused his authority for many years with excessive detentions and illegal wiretapping. Those kinds of abuses could range even more widely with this open-ended authorization.

As more than 30 House Democrats protested to Mr. McKeon, a declaration of “global war against nameless individuals, organizations, and nations” could “grant the president near unfettered authority to initiate military action around the world without further Congressional approval.” If a future administration wanted to attack Iran unilaterally, it could do so without having to consult with Congress.

This measure is unnecessary. The Bush administration demonstrated how dangerous it could be. The Democrats were right to demand the House conduct hearings on the measure, which was approved with little scrutiny. If it passes, the Senate should amend it out of existence, and President Obama should make clear he will veto it.

    A Conflict Without End, NYT, 16.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/opinion/17tue1.html

Pakistan's parliament

warns U.S. over bin Laden raid

ISLAMABAD | Sat May 14, 2011
1:27pm EDT
Reuters
By Zeeshan Haider

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan's parliament condemned on Saturday the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, warning Pakistan might cut supply lines to U.S. forces in Afghanistan if there were further military incursions.

According to one legislator, Pakistan's intelligence chief told a closed session of MPs he was ready to resign over the bin Laden affair, which has embarrassed the country and led to accusations Pakistani security agents knew where the al Qaeda chief was hiding.

There has been criticism of the government and military, partly because bin Laden had apparently remained undetected in Pakistan for years, but also because of the failure to detect or stop the U.S. operation to get him.

"Parliament ... condemned the unilateral action in Abbottabad which constitutes a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty," it said in a resolution issued after security chiefs briefed legislators.

The covert raid by U.S. special forces on bin Laden's house in the garrison town of Abbottabad, 50 km (30 miles) north of Islamabad, has strained already prickly ties with the United States and prompted revenge attacks by his supporters.

On Saturday, a bomb ripped through a bus in Khairian, a small garrison town in central Pakistan, killing at least five people and wounding more than a dozen, police said.

The attack came a day after two suicide bombers attacked a military academy in a northwestern town killing 80 people in what Pakistani Taliban militants said was their first act of revenge for bin Laden's death on May 2.

Pakistan has dismissed as absurd any suggestion that authorities knew bin Laden was holed up in a high-walled compound near the country's top military academy.

The U.S. administration has not accused Pakistan of complicity in hiding bin Laden but has said he must have had some sort of support network, which it wants to uncover.

U.S. Senator John Kerry said the United States wanted Pakistan to be a "real" ally in combating militants but serious questions remained in their relations.

"But we're not trying to find a way to break the relationship apart, we're trying to find a way to build it," said Kerry, a Democrat close to the Obama administration and who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters in Afghanistan.

Kerry is due to visit Pakistan in the coming days.

Members of the two houses of parliament said the government should review ties with the United States to safeguard Pakistan's national interests and they also called for an end to U.S. attacks on militants with its pilotless drone aircraft.

They also called for an independent commission to investigate the bin Laden case.

 

SUPPLY LINES

Pakistan officially objects to the drone attacks, but U.S. officials have long said they are carried out under an agreement between the countries.

The legislators said U.S. "unilateral actions" such as the Abbottabad raid and drone strikes were unacceptable, and the government should consider cutting vital U.S. lines of supply for its forces in Afghanistan unless they stopped.

Earlier, a U.S. drone fired missiles at a vehicle in North Waziristan on the Afghan border killing five militants.

It was the fourth drone attack since bin Laden was killed.

Police in Charsadda said they had recovered for analysis body parts of the two suicide bombers who killed at least 80 struck at a paramilitary force academy.

A Taliban spokesman said on Friday the attack was in revenge for bin Laden's death and vowed there would be more.

The killing of bin Laden could trigger a backlash from his supporters across a giant area surrounding Afghanistan, the Shangahi Cooperation Council (SCO) regional security body said.

Dominated by China and Russia, the SCO also unites the mostly Muslim ex-Soviet Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

"Craving for revenge, the supporters of al Qaeda, the Taliban movement and other terrorist and extremist organizations may cause a new wave of terror," Kazakh Foreign Minister Yerzgan Kazykhanov told a meeting with his SCO counterparts in Almaty.

 

CIVILIAN CONTROL

Pakistani intelligence chief Lieutenant-General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, head of the military's main Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, told parliament in a closed-door briefing he was "ready to resign" over the bin Laden affair, a legislator said.

Pasha, who was asked tough questions by some members of parliament, told the assembly he did not want to "hang around" if parliament deemed him responsible, legislator Riaz Fatyana told reporters.

"I am ready to resign," Fatyana quoted the ISI chief as saying.

Opposition leader and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif said civilian leaders, not the security agencies, should be deciding policy toward India, the United States and Afghanistan.

"The elected government should formulate foreign policy. A parallel policy or parallel government should not be allowed to work," Sharif told a news conference.

 

(Additional reporting by Dmitry Solovyov, Bashir Ansari; Writing by Robert Birsel; Editing by Matthew Jones)

    Pakistan's parliament warns U.S. over bin Laden raid, R, 14.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/14/us-binladen-idUSTRE7410D320110514

Exclusive:

Pornography found

in bin Laden hideout:

officials

WASHINGTON | Fri May 13, 2011
1:28pm EDT
Reuters
By Mark Hosenball and Tabassum Zakaria

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A stash of pornography was found in the hideout of Osama bin Laden by the U.S. commandos who killed him, current and former U.S. officials said on Friday.

The pornography recovered in bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive, according to the officials, who discussed the discovery with Reuters on condition of anonymity.

The officials said they were not yet sure precisely where in the compound the pornography was discovered or who had been viewing it. Specifically, the officials said they did not know if bin Laden himself had acquired or viewed the materials.

Reports from Abbottabad have said that bin Laden's compound was cut off from the Internet or other hard-wired communications networks. It is unclear how compound residents would have acquired the pornography.

But a video released by the Obama administration confiscated from the compound showed bin Laden watching pictures of himself on a TV screen, indicating that the compound was equipped with video playback equipment.

Materials carted away from the compound by the U.S. commandos included digital thumb drives, which U.S. officials believe may have been a principal means by which couriers carried electronic messages to and from the late al Qaeda leader.

Three other U.S. officials familiar with evidence gathered during investigations of other Islamic militants said the discovery of pornography is not uncommon in such cases.

(Reporting by Mark Hosenball and Tabassum Zakaria; editing by Warren Strobel)

    Exclusive: Pornography found in bin Laden hideout: officials, R, 13.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/13/us-binladen-porn-idUSTRE74C5CG20110513

Bombers take bin Laden revenge

in Pakistan

CHARSADDA, Pakistan | Fri May 13, 2011
6:38pm EDT
Reuters
By Mian Khursheed

CHARSADDA, Pakistan (Reuters) - Suicide bombers killed 80 people at a Pakistani paramilitary academy on Friday in revenge for the death of Osama bin Laden in a U.S. raid and militants in Pakistan vowed to carry out more attacks.

A member of the Pakistani parliament said Lieutenant-General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, Pakistan's spy chief, said he was "ready to resign" over the bin Laden affair that has embarrassed the nation. Pakistan's opposition leader accused the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, spy agency of negligence and incompetence.

Followers of bin Laden have vowed revenge for the al Qaeda chief's death and the Pakistani Taliban said Friday's attack by two suicide bombers in the northwestern town of Charsadda was their first taste of vengeance.

"There will be more," militant spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said by telephone from an undisclosed location.

The bombers struck as recruits were going on leave and 65 of them were among the 80 dead. Pools of blood strewn with soldiers' caps and shoes lay on the road outside the academy as the wounded, looking dazed with parts of their clothes ripped away by shrapnel, were loaded into trucks.

Pakistan's military and government have drawn criticism at home, partly for not finding bin Laden but more for failing to detect or stop the U.S. raid on May 2 that killed him.

A senior Pakistani general also canceled a planned visit to the United States. Pakistan depends heavily on U.S. aid.

In addition, U.S. authorities in Pakistan interviewed three of bin Laden's widows, detained by Pakistan in the compound after the U.S. raid, but gathered little new information, U.S. officials said in Washington.

Pakistan said it would repatriate the three widows and their children. One is from Yemen and the others from Saudi Arabia.

U.S. special forces killed bin Laden, the man behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, at a compound near Pakistan's top military academy in the northern town of Abbottabad. Pakistan welcomed his death as a major step against militancy but called the secret U.S. raid a violation of its sovereignty.

Shahid Ali, 28, was on his way to his shop when the bombs went off in Charsadda. He tried to help survivors. "A young boy was lying near a wrecked van asked me to take him to hospital. I got help and we got him into a vehicle," Ali said.

 

'DISRUPT, DISMANTLE AND DEFEAT'

In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner condemned the attack, offered condolences to the families of the victims, and stressed the U.S. alliance with Pakistan.

"Terrorists have shown time and again that they are the true enemy ... of the people and the government of Pakistan," Toner said. "We respect the nation's sacrifices in the fight against terrorism and will continue to stand with Pakistan in our joint struggle to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda and allied terrorist organizations."

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the United States would be "very vigilant" about revenge attacks.

Hours after the bombing, a U.S. drone aircraft fired missiles at a vehicle in North Waziristan on the Afghan border, killing five militants, Pakistani security officials said.

It was the fourth drone attack since bin Laden was killed, inflaming another sore issue between Pakistan and the United States. Pakistan officially objects to the attacks, saying they violate its sovereignty and feed public anger.

Military and intelligence chiefs gave parliament a closed-door briefing in which ISI chief Pasha told legislators he was ready to take responsibility for any criminal failing, Information Minister Firdous Ashiq Awan said.

"If any of our responsibility is determined and any gap identified, that our negligence was criminal negligence, and there was an intentional failure, then we are ready to face any consequences," Awan told Express TV, citing Pasha.

Another member of parliament said Pasha told the assembly he did not want to "hang around" if parliament deems him responsible. "I am ready to resign," Riaz Fatyana quoted the ISI chief as saying.

The spy chief also told parliament bin Laden had been isolated, Awan said. "We had already killed all his allies and so we had killed him even before he was dead. He was living like a dead man," Awan quoted Pasha as saying.

The chairman of Pakistan's joint chiefs of staff committee, General Khalid Shameem Wynne, canceled a five-day visit to the United States that had been set to begin on May 22.

"The visit could not be undertaken under existing circumstances," a military official told Reuters.

He did not elaborate, but the decision to cancel the visit came as the Cabinet defense committee said it was reviewing cooperation with the United States on counterterrorism.

U.S. officials are sifting through what they describe as a treasure trove of intelligence material seized in the raid on bin Laden's compound.

Officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, revealed on Friday that a stash of video pornography was found in the hideout there but said they did not know if bin Laden himself had acquired or viewed the material.

The White House also said President Barack Obama would lay out his vision for Middle East policy next Thursday, using bin Laden's death as a chance to recast the U.S. response to political upheaval in the Arab world.

Former U.S. President George W. Bush, who spent years searching in vain for bin Laden, described for the first time the call he received from Obama informing him that U.S. forces had killed the al Qaeda leader.

Bush said he was eating souffles at a Dallas restaurant when he got word Obama was trying to reach him.

"I excused myself and went home to take the call," Bush said. "Obama simply said, 'Osama bin Laden is dead.'" After Obama described the U.S. raid and the decision he made to go ahead with the mission, Bush said he told Obama, "Good call."

 

(Additional reporting by Zeeshan Haider, Haji Mujtaba, Rebecca Conway, Augustine Anthony and Izaz Mohmand in Pakistan, Arshad Mohammed, Steve Holland, Mark Hosenball and Tabassum Zakaria in Washington; Writing by Will Dunham; Editing by Peter Cooney)

    Bombers take bin Laden revenge in Pakistan, R, 13.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/13/us-binladen-idUSTRE7410D320110513

Q+A: Pakistan's Taliban:

who are they what can they do?

ISLAMABAD | Fri May 13, 2011
6:36am EDT
Reuters
By Robert Birsel

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistani Taliban militants claimed responsibility Friday for a double bomb attack on paramilitary force academy in the town of Charsadda that killed 80 people, saying it was their first revenge strike for the killing of Osama bin Laden on May 2.

A militant spokesman vowed more such attacks.

Following are some questions and answers about the Pakistani Taliban, their motives and capabilities.

WHO ARE THE PAKISTANI TALIBAN?

The militants are mostly ethnic Pashtuns from the semi-autonomous tribal belt along the Afghan border where Pakistan and the United States poured in weapons in the 1980s to support Islamist fighters, including bin Laden, battling Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

There are different Taliban factions in places such as North and South Waziristan, Bajaur and Mohmand, united under the Pakistani Taliban banner. They have links with the Afghan Taliban, most of whom are fellow Pashtuns although the Afghan militants do not attack in Pakistan.

The Pakistani Taliban have strong links with al Qaeda and militant factions from other parts of Pakistan, in particular Punjab province. Pakistani Taliban have been providing training and other support to outside militants, including Westerners, in their strongholds.

 

WHAT ARE THEY FIGHTING FOR?

They are vehemently opposed to Pakistan's alliance with the United States in the campaign against militancy launched after the September 11, 2001, attacks. As Pakistan, under U.S. pressure, stepped up operations against militants on the Afghan border, Pakistani Taliban attacks on the security forces picked up.

They launched their war against Pakistan in earnest after security forces cleared gunmen from a radical mosque in the capital, Islamabad, in July 2007 with the loss of about 100 lives.

 

WHAT ARE THEIR METHODS

The militants have killed hundreds of pro-government tribal leaders in the Pashtun border lands, decimating traditional power networks through which the central government exerted control, and imposing their vision of Islamist rule.

While taking control of much of the tribal belt, the militants have repeatedly attacked the security forces in northwestern towns and cities with suicide bombers and ambushes. They have tried to expand their zones of influence and took control of the scenic Swat valley, northwest of Islamabad, before the military launched an offensive in 2009 to push them out.

 

WHAT ARE THEIR CAPABILITIES

The militants have shown time and again that they can inflict heavy casualties wherever they want and they have the capability to launch sophisticated assaults on prime targets at the heart of the security establishment.

They have attacked the army's headquarters in the city of Rawalpindi and a nearby mosque where many officers were praying. They have blown up buses carrying staff of the main Inter-Services Intelligence agency to work in Rawalpindi and set off car bombs outside several offices of the ISI and other security agencies in various cities including Lahore.

They have attacked military and police training facilities, with suicide bombers and gunmen, in several places in the northwest. They have attacked numerous military camps and the country's main defense industry complex. They have set off bombs in mosques where their rivals were praying and numerous gatherings of rival tribal elders. They have attacked offices of the United Nations and aid groups, a visiting Sri Lankan cricket team and the shrines of moderate Sufis and members of rival sects.

The Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for the assassination of numerous army over recent years officers and a Christian government minister this year. They were accused of killing former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007 but they denied it.

 

WHAT IS THEIR REACH?

While their activities have been almost entirely confined to Pakistan, they have shown an interest in expanding their range under the banner of al Qaeda.

A suicide bombing at a U.S. base in Afghanistan's Khost province in 2009, carried out by a Jordanian national, killed seven Central Intelligence Agency employees. In video footage released after the attack, the bomber was shown sitting with Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, a stark illustration of growing links between the Pakistani insurgents and foreign militants.

A Pakistani-born American who tried to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square last year told a court he got bomb-making training and funding from the Pakistani Taliban.

    Q+A: Pakistan's Taliban: who are they what can they do?, R, 13.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/13/us-pakistan-taliban-qa-idUSTRE74C21620110513

Suicide bombing kills at least 69

in Pakistan

CHARSADDA, Pakistan | Fri May 13, 2011
1:36am EDT
Reuters
By Fayaz Aziz

CHARSADDA, Pakistan (Reuters) - A suicide bomber on a motorcycle killed at least 69 people at a paramilitary force academy in northwest Pakistan on Friday, in what Pakistani Taliban militants said was retaliation for the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden in the country.

The first major bombing in Pakistan since bin Laden's death on May 2, it will reinforce fears of retaliation by al Qaeda and allied groups, like the Pakistani Taliban, scattered around the world and loosely connected by ideology.

"It's the first revenge for the martyrdom of ... bin Laden. There will be more," Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said by telephone from an undisclosed location.

The bomber struck soon after dawn as the recruits were on their way out of the gates of the Frontier Constabulary academy in the town of Charsadda on leave. Police said there was another explosion around the same time but it had not been determined if that too was caused by a suicide bomber.

"The death toll is now 69, it was a suicide bombing," said Nisar Sarwat, town police chief.

Of the dead, 65 of them were recruits.

In the last major attack in Pakistan, an unstable South Asian country with a stagnant economy, two Taliban suicide bombers killed at least 41 people at a Sufi shrine on April 3 in a central city.

A new push by militants is the last thing Pakistani authorities need now.

The U.S. special forces operation to kill bin Laden embarrassed the Pakistani government and military, who are under pressure to explain how the al Qaeda chief lived undetected in the garrison town of Abbottabad, about a two hour drive from intelligence headquarters.

Security force camps, posts sand training grounds have been attacked repeatedly in Pakistan over recent years.

"WHOSE WAR?"

The scene outside the academy was typical -- pools of blood mixed with soldiers caps and shoes.

Body parts of the suicide bomber served as a reminder of the steady supply of Pakistanis willing to blow themselves up, inspired by al Qaeda's calls for holy war.

"As we were sitting in the buses there was a small blast. Within moments there was a second, big blast. I fell on the road and became unconscious," said soldier Shafeeq-ur-Rehman, whose leg was wounded in the blast.

As he spoke from a bed at Lady Reading hospital in the city of Peshawar, tearful people brought in dead and wounded relatives to the facility that has treated thousands of victims of the struggle between the army and militant groups.

"Why are we being killed? Whose war is this? What is our sin"," asked an elderly man with a grey beard as the body of his teenage son was carried in on a stretcher.

The Pakistani Taliban launched their insurgency in 2007 after a military raid on Islamabad's Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, where militant leaders and others were holed up.

A series of army offensives against their bases in the lawless Pashtun tribal belt on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border has failed to break their resolve.

The killing of bin Laden in Pakistan is thought unlikely to weaken the Pakistan Taliban, while the United States has stepped up drone attacks on militants since bin Laden's death.

One of bin Laden's widows told investigators he lived in Pakistan for more than seven years, security officials said.

The United States, which has questioned Pakistan's reliability as a partner in the American war on militancy, provides billions of dollars of aid to Islamabad.

 

(Additional reporting by Zeeshan Haider and Mian Khursheed in Islamabad;
Writing by Michael Georgy; Wditing by Robert Birsel)

    Suicide bombing kills at least 69 in Pakistan, R, 13.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/13/us-pakistan-bombing-idUSTRE74C0GU20110513

Suspects in Terror Case

Wanted to Kill Jews, Officials Say

May 12, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM and AL BAKER

The 26-year-old man from Queens had discussed growing a beard and the side curls of a Hasidic Jew, the police commissioner said, a disguise that he apparently hoped would enable him to attack a synagogue in Manhattan “and take out the whole entire building.”

His ambitions did not end there. The man, a native of Algeria, also expressed an interest in blowing up the Empire State Building, the commissioner said.

He was not a member of a terrorist group like Al Qaeda, the commissioner said. Indeed, his father said, he once sold cosmetics at Saks Fifth Avenue and was now trying to be a fashion model.

Yet driven by a hatred of Jews and a belief that Muslims are mistreated the world over, the man, Ahmed Ferhani, began piecing together a plan to commit terrorism, the authorities said on Thursday, leading to his arrest after he and an accomplice bought weapons in a police undercover operation.

Mr. Ferhani, along with a 20-year-old naturalized United States citizen from Morocco, were charged on Thursday in a terrorism case that is remarkable not only for the would-be model-actor the authorities have identified as its central player, but also for the unusual way the case was brought.

The charges were announced at a City Hall news conference with arrest photos on display, featuring comments from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg; the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly; and the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. The case was presented in State Supreme Court, with no involvement from the F.B.I. or the United States attorney’s office, typically crucial in such investigations and prosecutions.

The accusations as detailed by the three officials sounded chilling. Just before Mr. Ferhani and his co-defendant, Mohamed Mamdouh, were arrested on Manhattan’s West Side on Wednesday evening, they had bought a hand grenade, three semiautomatic pistols and 150 rounds of ammunition.

They wanted to kill Jews; they mulled blowing up churches; and shortly before Mr. Ferhani was arrested at 58th Street along the West Side Highway, he asked an undercover detective, who was posing as a gun dealer, if the man could get him a bullet-resistant vest, a silencer and a police radio.

Mr. Mamdouh was arrested nearby.

“They conspired and took concrete steps to blow up synagogues and churches to advance those ideological goals and to possess and use illegal firearms and explosives,” Mr. Vance said at the news conference. “They did it for jihad, something they referred simply to as the cause, which meant the violence and armed fight against Israel, Jews and other non-Muslims and the West.”

Mr. Kelly said Mr. Ferhani, using an expletive, explained he was fed up that Muslims around the world were being treated “like dogs.”

The two men, who both live in Queens, were charged in a criminal complaint under a state terrorism statute passed after the Sept. 11 attacks that Mr. Vance said had not been used before in New York City in a terrorism case. Among the charges were second-degree conspiracy as a crime of terrorism, second-degree conspiracy as a hate crime and second-degree criminal possession of a weapon as a crime of terrorism. If convicted of the top count, the men face life in prison without parole.

The charges concluded what Mr. Kelly said was a seven-month investigation.

Major terrorism cases are generally investigated by the F.B.I.-N.Y.P.D. Joint Terrorism Task Force, staffed with police detectives and federal agents, and prosecuted by the United States attorney’s office in federal court. One law enforcement official said the Police Department’s Intelligence Division, which handled the case, had notified the task force about it and the group had opted not to get involved.

Little clarification was offered at the news conference, where officials offered explanations for why a case presented as a serious terrorism matter had not been brought in federal court.

“They don’t take all the cases,” Mr. Bloomberg said simply, referring to the federal authorities.

The commissioner said federal authorities have the right of first refusal on any tip, adding that the case began as a local criminal matter with the district attorney’s office, and “it was logical to keep it going when it morphed into a terrorism investigation.”

Mr. Vance said in this case, prosecutors worked with the local police, but suggested that in some matters, it was important to share information with federal authorities. A spokesman for the F.B.I., Timothy Flannelly, declined to comment.

The reasoning notwithstanding, Mr. Vance described Mr. Ferhani as a volatile threat.

“He was committed to violent jihad, and his plans became bigger and more violent with each passing week,” Mr. Vance said.

At Mr. Ferhani’s home in Whitestone, Queens, his father said his son had befriended people who were bad influences.

“He’s a very good kid,” the father, J. Ferhani, 51, said. “He got involved with a bad kid. He’s a naïve person. He has a very good heart, but if somebody tries to tell him something, he always believes it.”

Told of the accusations against his son, Mr. Ferhani, a cabdriver, laughed in disbelief. “Oh my God, that’s unbelievable,” he said. “Bomb a synagogue? That’s not my son.”

He said his son was raised as a Muslim, in Algeria, before the family fled in 1994 at the height of its civil war. “But he’s not a religious fanatic,” Mr. Ferhani said. “He doesn’t pray; he drinks.”

Late in the afternoon, the two suspects appeared before Judge Melissa C. Jackson in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

A prosecutor, Margaret E. Gandy, asked the judge to hold both men without bail. “The seriousness of this crime is considerable,” she said, adding that investigators had an overwhelming amount of evidence. As she spoke, Mr. Ferhani lifted his head and mouthed words that could not be heard from the gallery.

Neither defendant entered a formal plea, but lawyers for both said their clients denied wrongdoing. Judge Jackson ordered the men held without bail.

 

John Eligon, Colin Moynihan and Noah Rosenberg contributed reporting.

    Suspects in Terror Case Wanted to Kill Jews, Officials Say, NYT, 12.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/nyregion/two-men-arrested-in-new-york-terror-case-police-say.html

Special report:

The bin Laden kill plan

WASHINGTON | Thu May 12, 2011
7:41pm EDT
By Caren Bohan, Mark Hosenball,
Tabassum Zakaria and Missy Ryan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A pivotal moment in the long, tortuous quest to find Osama bin Laden came years before U.S. spy agencies discovered his hermetic compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

In July 2007, then Senator Barack Obama's top foreign policy advisers met in the modest two-room Massachusetts Avenue offices that served as his campaign's Washington headquarters. There, they debated the incendiary language Obama would use in an upcoming speech on national security, according to a senior White House official.

Pakistan was a growing worry. A new, highly classified intelligence analysis, called a National Intelligence Estimate, had just identified militant safe havens in Pakistan's border areas as a major threat to U.S. security. The country's military leader, Pervez Musharraf, had recently cut a deal with local tribes that effectively eased pressure on al Qaeda and related groups.

Days after the Washington meeting, candidate Obama told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars: "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

It was the most carefully crafted sentence in the speech, a statement no U.S. leader had ever made. (Text of Obama's speech: link.reuters.com/weg59r)

In the two weeks since President Obama made good on that threat -- in fact, bested it by declining to give Pakistan a chance to act first -- reams have been written about the painstaking detective hunt that led to bin Laden.

But Reuters interviews with two dozen current and former senior intelligence, White House and State Department officials reveal another side of the story.

The 13-year quest to find and eliminate bin Laden, from the November 1998 day he was indicted by a federal grand jury for his role in the East Africa embassy bombings, was filled with missteps, course adjustments and radical new departures for U.S. security policy. It ultimately led to a fortified compound in a little known Pakistani city named after a long-dead British major.

Even with bin Laden buried at sea, the changes to U.S. security policy could linger for years, or decades.

The mission to destroy bin Laden, and his network, sparked the creation of a chillingly bureaucratic process for deciding who would be on "kill lists," authorized for death at the hands of the CIA. It revolutionized the use of pilotless drones to find and attack militants; drove the controversially brutal treatment of detainees in U.S. custody; and brought the United States and Pakistan closer together, then wrenched them apart.

(Even in ordering the risky Navy SEAL raid on May 1, Obama made allowances for Pakistan's sensitivities. The raid was carried out by the U.S. military but under CIA legal authorities and command, partly for deniability if something went wrong and partly because the United States is not at war with Pakistan, a U.S. official said.)

But there was one constant in the search for bin Laden. On September 17, 2001, six days after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush issued a still-classified "finding" that gave the CIA "lethal authorities" to deal with the al Qaeda leader and his top lieutenants. Ever since, there was an expectation -- even a preference -- that bin Laden would be killed, not captured, Bush and Obama administration officials said.

The same day that Bush signed the directive, he publicly declared bin Laden was wanted "dead or alive."

Numerous officials said they knew of no explicit command that bin Laden was not to be taken alive. When he ordered the SEAL raid, Obama had on his desk a written protocol for what would happen if the al Qaeda chief were captured and removed from Pakistan to an unnamed U.S. military installation, the senior White House official said.

But it was vaguer than the rest of the operational plan, and the expectation among most of the people who planned and executed the mission was that bin Laden would be killed. If bin Laden had surrendered, Obama's senior advisers "would have to reconvene and make a decision about what to do with him," said one official, who like many requested anonymity to discuss sensitive national security matters. "It was intentionally left to be decided after the fact."

Richard Armitage, who was deputy secretary of state in Bush's first term, voiced the view that prevailed through two presidencies. "I think we took Osama bin Laden at his word, that he wanted to be a martyr," Armitage told Reuters.

The U.S. government, he said, would do all it could to help bin Laden realize that goal.

 

RABBIT HOLES AND WRONG TURNS

The hunt for bin Laden turned out to be riddled with dead ends, wrong turns and long, desolate periods of frustration.

The 9/11 attacks would push the Bush administration into a war in Iraq that critics -- including candidate Obama -- denounced as a dangerous diversion from al Qaeda and its Afghanistan/Pakistan nexus. Interrogation techniques such as "waterboarding," a form of simulated drowning, were used on a handful of suspects deemed most dangerous, sparking a debate -- it erupted again on May 2 -- over the best way to fight terrorism.

In Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains in December 2001, U.S. special forces came close to bin Laden -- perhaps within 2,000 meters, according to the published recollections of a former U.S. Army special forces commander who uses the pseudonym "Dalton Fury."

Opting to rely on local Afghan allies, the United States declined to send in the 1,500 U.S. Army Rangers needed to block bin Laden's escape route.

It would be more than nine years before U.S. special forces would get that close again.

In the intervening years, "there were a lot of empty rabbit holes down which we pursued and ultimately didn't find any results. It was very frustrating," said Juan Zarate, a top White House counter-terrorism aide from 2005-2009. "I always had a mantra that I used for myself, both not to get too discouraged and also with the counter-terrorism community, which is: these guys are not ghosts. They are flesh and blood and can be found and we'll find them."

With virtually no hard knowledge, U.S. counter-terrorism officials said they assumed bin Laden was hiding in the mountainous, lawless Afghan-Pakistan border region. But it's now believed that after Tora Bora, he spent some time in Afghanistan's eastern Kunar province, crossed the border into Pakistan in late summer or fall 2002, moved to a Pakistani village in 2003 for a couple of years, and hid in plain sight in Abbottabad beginning in 2005 or 2006.

Yet even in deadly U.S. failures, there were small breakthroughs.

On February 4, 2002, a Predator drone struck a group of men in Arab dress in the Zawar Kili area of eastern Afghanistan. Among them was a tall man to whom others were acting deferentially, U.S. officials said at the time.

It turned out not to be bin Laden. Reports quoted local residents saying it was a group of villagers collecting scrap metal. But before the episode was over, U.S. intelligence agencies had received, with help from the Saudi government, a DNA sample from bin Laden's extended family that would clinch identification if he were ever found.

 

FROM CAPTURE TO KILL

It was President Bill Clinton who launched the hunt for bin Laden. After the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Clinton signed what some former U.S. officials called a "covert action finding" authorizing CIA operations against al Qaeda, then regarded as a marginal Islamic militant faction with an eccentric, Saudi-born leader.

But some Clinton aides, led by attorney general Janet Reno, were concerned about the legality of killing bin Laden, former top intelligence and counter-terrorism officials said. Clinton's orders permitted U.S. forces to kill bin Laden in self-defense, but the prime directive was to capture him and bring him to justice in the United States.

The September 11, 2001, attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania instantly made such scruples seem anachronistic.

Bush's September 17, 2001, order, which is still highly classified, authorized the CIA to use all methods at its disposal -- explicitly including deadly force -- to wipe out al Qaeda and its leaders.

Presidential covert action findings never expire unless a president issues a new written order suspending or revoking them, current and former U.S. national security officials told Reuters. So Bush's nine-and-a-half-year-old order remained a key legal authority under which Obama launched the commando raid that led to bin Laden's death.

It was perhaps inevitable, then, that partisans of both men and their political parties would claim the lion's share of credit for bin Laden's demise.

Bush's order was both sweeping and general in the powers it granted to the CIA to launch operations against al Qaeda.

As Armitage and others recalled, 9/11 rapidly accelerated a program that had progressed only fitfully in the Clinton administration thanks to CIA-Pentagon turf battles: a scheme to arm increasingly sophisticated remote-controlled drone aircraft with missiles that could launch precision strikes.

In Bush's last months in office, and even more under Obama, the drone strikes expanded dramatically, rattling relations with Pakistan. But when it came time to attack the Abbottabad compound, Obama rejected an option for using drones, fearing civilian casualties and that proof of bin Laden's demise would never be found in the wreckage. (For similar reasons, the president also rejected an option which would have sent B-2 "Stealth" bombers to destroy bin Laden's lair.)

In the months after 9/11, the CIA forged ahead with three other major initiatives to eradicate bin Laden and company:

* A program in which militants captured by U.S. or allied forces were detained and interrogated either in special U.S. military facilities or in a network of secret CIA prisons, where some were subjected to harsh physical interrogation tactics dreamed up by agency contractors.

* Another program where captured militants were subjected to what the agency called "extraordinary rendition" and delivered without judicial proceedings into the custody of often-brutal security agencies in their native countries.

* A troubled effort to create a secret U.S. capability that would be similar to the "hit squads" deployed by Israel's Mossad and other spy agencies.

To guide the CIA's new activities, the Bush administration began drawing up a list of "high value targets," who were the top priority for intelligence gathering and who could be captured or killed depending upon the circumstances in which they were found.

There had been nothing quite like it before in U.S. history. Initially, according to former officials familiar with the process, the lists were compiled and approved by an interagency committee of lawyers and bureaucrats based on recommendations from the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

The U.S. spy agencies would propose a name for the high-value target list and prepare a dossier explaining who the suspect was and why he ought to be on the list, they said. This dossier would then be circulated to the interagency committee, whose members, including lawyers from the Justice Department, Pentagon and CIA, would review it. If the lawyers deemed the dossier adequate, the committee would then approve the individual's name for inclusion on the "high-value target" list -- subject to capture or death by American spies or soldiers.

The Obama White House approved adding American-born Anwar al-Awlaki, based in Yemen, to the target list in 2010 because officials believed the English-speaking Muslim cleric had gone beyond inspirational rhetoric and become involved in terrorism operations.

At any one time, the list would contain between 10 and 30 names, the most obvious ones being bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former officials said. At one point, Bush's advisers prepared for him a rogues' gallery of about 20 top suspects on the list, which was laminated in plastic. Bush kept it in his Oval Office desk. When militants on the chart were captured or killed, Bush would take it out of his desk and mark them off.

But bin Laden's name stayed on the list while the young orphans of 9/11 grew into teenagers.

 

THE TRAIL BACK

The plan to create CIA hit-squads proved another dead end. The original concept was to create surveillance and "lethal" teams under the agency's paramilitary wing, staffed by former military commandos and coyly named the Special Activities Division, according to two former officials familiar with internal government debates at the time.

That plan was put into cold storage by CIA director George Tenet, then revived by his successor Porter Goss with a twist: the agency would use outside contractors for the hit teams, to give it more deniability. Erik Prince, founder-owner of the controversial private military contractor then known as Blackwater and a former Navy SEAL, was invited to participate in brainstorming sessions. At some point, a former senior official said, the agency conducted training exercises in the field.

As one of his first acts, Obama's CIA chief Leon Panetta killed the hit squad idea for good, and informed congressional oversight committees, which had never been told of it.

The trail back to bin Laden began with the militants detained and interrogated by the CIA. That's the crucible of the debate over whether the United States veered badly off track in its war with al Qaeda, or was on the right course all along.

Did waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other "enhanced interrogation techniques," a phrase critics call a euphemism for torture, ultimately work? Or did such tactics muddy the search for bin Laden? Did old-fashioned, persistent investigation prevail in the end?

The debate is unlikely ever to be settled. But multiple U.S. intelligence officials told Reuters the real breakthrough that led to bin Laden came from a mysterious CIA detainee named Hassan Ghul. Ghul, who was not captured until 2004 at the earliest, was not subjected to waterboarding, the CIA's roughest and most controversial interrogation technique. It had already been phased out by the time he was captured. But two U.S. officials acknowledged he may well have been subjected to other coercive CIA tactics, possibly including stress positions, sleep deprivation and being slammed into a wall.

It was Ghul, the officials said, who after years of tantalizing hints from other detainees finally provided the information that prompted the CIA to focus intensely on finding Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti, pseudonym for the courier who would lead them to bin Laden.

Much about Ghul remains obscure, including his nationality. Two U.S. officials told Reuters, however, that at some point the CIA turned him over to authorities in Pakistan. The officials said their understanding is that in 2007, Pakistani authorities released him from custody. The officials said the U.S. government now believes Ghul has once again become a frontline militant fighter.

Leaving Ghul aside, it remains unclear whether the brutal interrogations -- which Obama banned upon taking office -- were effective or not.

The available facts, bolstered by evidence from secret Guantanamo detainee files made public by the WikiLeaks organization, suggest that some of the first information U.S. intelligence received about Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti surfaced in 2002, when the harshest elements of the CIA interrogation program were still in force.

Two high-ranking al Qaeda operatives, alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who was waterboarded repeatedly) and Abu Faraj al-Libbi (who was not), were questioned about the courier, current U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence said. Both tried to steer interrogators onto a different track, which only piqued the CIA's interest further, the officials said.

While Ghul's information brought tighter focus to the hunt for bin Laden's most important courier in 2004, it would be another two to three years before the agency discovered his true identity and more about his activities. A new president would take office before the Abbottabad hideout that Abu Ahmed and his brother are believed to have built for bin Laden was discovered.

 

RENEWED FOCUS ON PAKISTAN

To outsiders, it sometimes seemed as if the hunt for bin Laden languished in Bush's final years in office. That was not the case, aides said.

Former CIA director Michael Hayden told Reuters that each time he went to the White House for his weekly meeting with Bush, the president would always ask him, "Where are we, Mike?" Hayden always knew Bush was referring to bin Laden.

But Bush had expended huge resources -- military, financial, diplomatic and political -- in Iraq. Obama was intent on shifting the focus of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts back to South Asia, specifically to Pakistan.

Former aides to Bush acknowledge that while he took a tougher line on Pakistan toward the end of his term, the new Obama team displayed far less concern for fragile Pakistan's sensitivities.

"For a long time there was a strong inclination at the highest levels during our time to work with the Pakistanis, treat them as partners, defer to their national sensitivities ... There was some good reason for that," said a former top Bush aide, citing the need for Islamabad's help in countering terrorism, stopping nuclear proliferation and stabilizing Afghanistan.

Obama and his team "do seem more willing to push the envelope," he said.

Would Bush have handled the Abbottabad raid in the same way? "I really don't know for sure," the former aide said. "There's no doubt he would have ordered the assault in a heartbeat. But what would he have done regarding the Pakistanis? I'm not sure."

Vali Nasr, a senior State Department adviser on Afghanistan and Pakistan until last month, said: "Obama was fundamentally honest that the United States and Pakistan were on different trajectories in Afghanistan. Under Bush, there was this pretense that we were all in this war on terror together."

Obama had no close personal ties to Musharraf, who resigned shortly before the new U.S. president was elected. Obama's aides were increasingly skeptical of Pakistan's pledges that it would take care of al Qaeda, a senior White House official recalled. Most of all, Pakistan was a major player in Afghanistan, where Obama had pledged to turn around a war he acknowledged was going badly.

Those views hardened after Obama's first classified intelligence briefing in Chicago on a September day in 2008. He was now the Democratic nominee for president.

The briefing solidified Obama's view that "this guy was living inside Pakistan," the senior official said. "What I remember in terms of the aftermath of that briefing and into the transition was just how much the focus became on Pakistan." As Obama prepared to take office, Islamist militants rampaged in the Indian city of Mumbai. There were clear signs they had help from within Pakistan.

After taking office, Obama instructed CIA director Panetta to develop options for pursuing bin Laden and pour additional resources into the effort. While "a lot of good" had been done in the Bush years, the senior official said, resources for the CIA's bin Laden unit "fluctuated over time."

Obama wanted the effort revitalized and given a presidential imprimatur. With no public fanfare, the CIA escalated drone strikes on militants inside Pakistan.

 

ENDGAME

Obama was brought the lead about the Abbottabad compound in August 2010. Fewer than 10 people within the White House, and only a handful at the CIA, knew about it. By last month, that number had grown, as the CIA operators and military commandos who would execute a raid were read into developing operational plans.

At what would be a crucial, two-hour meeting on April 28, Obama, as is his custom, went around the room, asking each of his principal advisers for their views. At one point, laughter permeated the tension as each adviser prefaced his or her comments by saying, "This is a really hard call," the senior White House official said.

Obama was presented with four scenarios, some of which evoked the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" fiasco in Somalia: The team gets cleanly in and out with bin Laden. The team gets cleanly in and out, but bin Laden is not there. There's a messy situation on the ground, with fighting and casualties, and bin Laden is there. Worst of all was scenario four: the same as scenario three, but with no bin Laden in sight.

"There was discussion of catastrophic -- that was the word we used -- catastrophic outcomes where you had dead or injured U.S. personnel or a hostage-taking," the senior official said.

Obama left the room saying he had not yet made a decision, but a close aide knew that he had. "I knew with 100 percent certainty that he was going to decide to do this because I've worked for him for four years. I just knew. He said he'd do this."

Three days later, the group gathered in the White House Situation Room to monitor the raid as it unfolded. A mood of "tense silence" filled the room as Obama and the advisers waited for the next pieces of information. Then Panetta spoke the words U.S. officials had hoped to hear for years: "Geronimo" -- a code phrase meaning bin Laden had been found -- "EKIA." Enemy killed in action.

Amid a scramble to inform counterparts abroad, especially the Pakistanis, and to prepare for the release of the blockbuster news to the public, pizza and chips were brought in for fortification.

There would be tough questions ahead. Could U.S.-Pakistan relations be salvaged? Successful once, would Obama authorize similar raids against other leading militants? (Another top Obama aide would not "take that off the table.")

But now, there were at least a few moments for reflection. After years in the wilderness, literally and figuratively, the United States had got its man.

Obama walked along the White House colonnade to the East Room to deliver the news that many in the United States had by now guessed. He could hear the chants of "USA, USA" from a rally in Lafayette Park.

As Obama spoke, adviser and speechwriter Ben Rhodes turned to John Brennan, the president's top counter-terrorism adviser, and whispered: "How long have you been going after this guy?" Brennan immediately replied: "Fifteen years."

 

(This story was corrected to show proper date of indictment for embassy bombings.)

(Additional reporting by Zeeshan Haider in Pakistan; Writing by Warren Strobel;
Editing by Kristin Roberts and Claudia Parsons)

    Special report: The bin Laden kill plan, R, 12.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/12/us-binladen-kill-idUSTRE74B6H820110512

Key bin Laden intel

came from detainee later released

WASHINGTON | Thu May 12, 2011
4:19pm EDT
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The real breakthrough that led to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden came from a mysterious CIA detainee, Hassan Ghul, according to a Reuters special report published on Thursday.

Based on interviews with two dozen current and former senior intelligence, White House and State Department officials, the special report explores the policies and actions of the United States in its 13-year hunt for bin Laden.

According to the report, it was Ghul who after years of tantalizing hints from other detainees finally provided the information that prompted the CIA to focus intensely on finding Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti, pseudonym for the courier who would lead them to bin Laden.

Two U.S. officials told Reuters the U.S. government believes Ghul was released by Pakistani authorities in 2007 and has once again become a frontline militant.

Bin Laden was long believed to be holed up in rugged mountain areas, but was found hiding in plain sight in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

President Barack Obama's decision not to notify Pakistan before the raid was in keeping with a greater willingness by Obama and his team to "push the envelope" in relations with Islamabad, according to a former Bush aide.

A key legal authority under which the raid was launched remains a September 17, 2001, presidential directive by former President George W. Bush that authorized the CIA to capture or kill top terrorism suspects.

Raid planners expected bin Laden would be killed, but they also had a vaguer contingency plan about what to do if he were captured, officials said.

 

(Reporting by Caren Bohan, Mark Hosenball, Tabassum Zakaria,
Missy Ryan and Warren Strobel; Editing by Claudia Parsons)

    Key bin Laden intel came from detainee later released, R, 12.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/12/us-binladen-kill-intel-idUSTRE74B6I420110512

Even post-bin Laden,

U.S. drones in Pakistan press on

WASHINGTON | Thu May 12, 2011
4:19pm EDT
Reuters
By Missy Ryan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The aggressive U.S. campaign of drone strikes inside Pakistan will not ease despite the killing of Osama bin Laden, even as the unilateral action infuriates Pakistanis and further strains diplomatic ties.

Washington will continue hitting Pakistan-based militants blamed for attacks on U.S. soldiers in neighboring Afghanistan, current and former U.S. officials said.

The use of missile-armed Predator drones to attack militants has widened a diplomatic divide with Pakistan and sharpened anti-U.S. anger -- but killed few senior militants.

The Pentagon, however, sees the drones, unmanned aerial vehicles that can fly for hours at a time, as a key weapon for disrupting al Qaeda and other militants in tribal areas where Pakistan's government has little control.

The bin Laden operation -- so secret Pakistan was kept in the dark -- appears to have strengthened the hand of those within the Obama administration, notably in the intelligence community, who have advocated going around Pakistan when attacking al Qaeda and other militants.

"There are absolutely no plans at present to cease or scale back U.S. counterterrorism operations in Pakistan," one U.S. official said on condition of anonymity. "Efforts to thwart terrorism will continue."

The strikes lay bare the challenge Washington faces with Pakistan as it seeks to stabilize Afghanistan, where Obama hopes to begin withdrawing troops this summer despite record violence. The United States is also trying to avoid undermining nuclear-armed Islamabad's weak civilian leadership.

"The question is whether Pakistan will continue to tolerate the drones," an aide in the U.S. House of Representatives said on condition of anonymity.

"As long as we can get away with it as a convenience, and Pakistan doesn't object too much, we'll do it."

A senior Pakistani security official, asked if Pakistan would take steps to stop the strikes, said there was "nothing of that sort" under way to derail the drone program.

"You have to realize that all (the) equipment you use is theirs, so you can't afford confrontation with them," the official said on condition of anonymity.

The strikes, launched remotely from sophisticated Predator aircraft, were intensified beginning in July 2008 as frustration mounted in the Bush administration at Pakistan's lukewarm pursuit of Taliban and other militants operating from Pakistan's lawless western tribal regions.

Obama, who adopted a tougher line on Pakistan when he took office in January 2009, has redoubled the tempo of the strikes. Since that time, drones have killed around an estimated 1,400 militants, and close to 100 civilians, according to a tally by the Long War Journal, a military blog.

Despite the anger unleashed in Islamabad by the May 2 raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, Washington did not hesitate to resume the strikes. Only four days later, it launched a series of drone attacks killing at least 17 suspected militants in North Waziristan.

 

CALCULATING COSTS, BENEFITS

U.S. intelligence officials favor the strikes because they do not endanger American lives and allow the United States to sidestep Islamabad's seeming unwillingness to disrupt militant groups not seen as a threat to Pakistan.

"The drone strikes have been a powerful tool to disrupt al Qaeda operations in tribal areas," where the Pakistani military has only a limited presence, said Lisa Curtis, a former CIA analyst and State Department official now at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

Obama weighed the option of a drone strike on bin Laden's compound. His decision to instead dispatch elite commandos raises new questions about the program's effectiveness and its drawbacks.

The strikes have failed to kill the most wanted insurgents, even as they expose local military and civilian leaders to mounting public fury over what many Pakistanis see as a flagrant violation of their national sovereignty.

Senior Democratic Senator John Kerry, who is a de facto U.S. envoy to Pakistan, warned last week that Pakistani leaders could pay a high price for being seen as tacitly accepting a missile program that has killed Pakistani civilians.

Vali Nasr, who until last month was a senior State Department adviser on Pakistan, said Islamabad may ask Washington to halt its counterterrorism activities in Pakistan, including drone strikes, because they "are no longer politically viable for the Pakistani government."

"We are very happy about this operation, but it will actually make continuation of most of our counterterrorism programs far more difficult. It was almost like a one-shot deal that came at a high cost," he said.

If Pakistan is willing to gamble billions of dollars in U.S. aid, it might permanently shut down the U.S. ability to launch drones from western Pakistan, forcing Washington to launch the aircraft from even less secure Afghanistan.

Pakistan might also make it harder for CIA officials to enter the country or close down NATO's main supply route for its campaign in Afghanistan.

Since 2001, Congress has approved about $20 billion in direct U.S. aid and military reimbursement for Pakistan, and the Obama administration has requested about $3 billion in military aid for the next fiscal year.

The calculus in Islamabad could change, however, if U.S. lawmakers follow through with threats to reduce aid or if simmering discontent in Pakistan intensifies.

"I don't know where that threshold is," Nasr said. "The military cannot be seen as not reacting -- some of this will be theater to placate public opinion, and some of it will be real to show they're in control of their own house."

 

(Additional reporting by Augustine Anthony, Kamran Haider
and Rebecca Conway in Islamabad and Mark Hosenball
and Susan Cornwell in Washington; editing by Mohammad Zargham)

    Even post-bin Laden, U.S. drones in Pakistan press on, R, 12.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/12/us-binladen-kill-drones-idUSTRE74B6I520110512

U.S. attacks militants in Pakistan

as pressure grows

ISLAMABAD | Thu May 12, 2011
4:49am EDT
Reuters
By Kamran Haider

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A U.S. drone aircraft fired missiles at militants in Pakistan on Thursday, killing eight of them, Pakistani officials said, the third such attack since U.S. forces found and killed Osama bin Laden in his Pakistani hideout.

The killing of the al Qaeda chief in a U.S. raid on May 2 has strained ties between Washington and Islamabad, with suspicion in the United States that Pakistan knew where bin Laden was hiding and Pakistan angered by a raid it saw as a violation of sovereignty.

The drone strikes also anger many Pakistanis and are a source of friction between the allies. Pakistan officially objects to the attacks although U.S. officials say they are carried out on an understanding with Pakistan.

A drone fired two missiles at a vehicle in the North Waziristan region that was heading toward the Afghan border, killing eight militants, the Pakistani officials said.

"At least four drones are still flying over the area," said one of the officials, who declined to be identified.

The U.S. CIA regularly launches attacks with its pilotless aircraft at militants in Pakistan's Pashtun tribal lands who cross into Afghanistan to battle Western forces there.

But the third such strike since bin Laden's killing indicated an intensification of the attacks compared with the weeks before the Saudi-born militant was killed.

The U.S. raid on bin Laden's compound has embarrassed and enraged Pakistan's military and has added to already strained ties.

Pakistan rejects allegations that it was either incompetent in tracking down the man behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States or complicit in hiding him in the town of Abbottabad just 50 km (30 miles) from Islamabad.

Bin Laden's killing has also led to domestic criticism of the government and military in Pakistan, over both the fact bin laden had been able to live in the country apparently undetected, and over the secret U.S. raid.

Opposition leader and former premier Nawaz Sharif accused the military's powerful spy agency of negligence and incompetence.

Sharif, who heads the largest opposition party, rejected a government decision to put an army general in charge of the inquiry into intelligence lapses that led to bin Laden's killing, calling instead for a judicial commission to dispel doubts about the objectivity of the investigation.

U.S. special forces swooped in on helicopters from Afghanistan undetected by Pakistani forces to kill bin Laden in his high-walled lair.

GRUESOME PHOTOS

Sharif also demanded to know how the world's most-wanted man could remain holed up less than a kilometer (0.6 miles) from the country's main military academy, and bemoaned the damage the matter has caused to Pakistan's reputation abroad.

U.S. lawmakers are questioning whether Pakistan is serious about fighting militants in the region, and some have called for a suspension of American aid to Islamabad.

Pakistan's pervasive Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency has a long history of contacts with Islamist militants.

But a senior U.S. lawmaker said in Washington it was not clear that senior Pakistani officials had sheltered bin Laden.

"Today, from all the information I have seen, we can't conclusively say that somebody senior knew and promoted safe haven," said U.S. Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.

Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, an army general who seized power in 1999 and lives in exile in London, told ABC News that there was a possibility that rogue junior officers in the country's intelligence and military might have been aware of bin Laden's whereabouts for years.

The United States has sent intelligence extracted from material seized from bin Laden's compound to several foreign governments, U.S. and Western counter-terrorism officials told Reuters.

Among the material being examined most closely is what a U.S. official described as a "handwritten manual" that American experts believe was penned by bin Laden himself.

The United States and the governments with which it has shared data have found no evidence of specific, imminent plots against U.S. or Western targets, officials said.

In Washington, a U.S. senator who was shown photographs of bin Laden after he was shot said they left no doubt he was dead.

James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, said he saw 15 photographs and described some that showed brain matter protruding from an eye socket

"They're gruesome, of course, because it was taken right after the incident," Inhofe told Fox News.

U.S. President Barack Obama decided not to release post-mortem photos of bin Laden because doing so could incite violence and be used as an al Qaeda propaganda tool.

 

(Writing by Robert Birsel; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

    U.S. attacks militants in Pakistan as pressure grows, R, 12.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/12/us-binladen-idUSTRE7410D320110512

U.S. moves to freeze

assets of Pakistani militant

WASHINGTON | Wed May 11, 2011
4:04pm EDT
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States declared Badruddin Haqqani, the commander of a Pakistan-based militant group, a "specially designated global terrorist," a step that will freeze any of his assets under U.S. jurisdiction.

Acting under a U.S. executive order targeting terrorism and those who support it, the move by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also bars U.S. individuals or groups from transactions with him.

"This action will help stem the flow of financial and other assistance to this dangerous individual," the State Department said in a statement announcing the action, formally known as a "designation."

Haqqani is the son of Afghan Pashtun warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani, who founded the so-called Haqqani network that fights foreign forces in eastern Afghanistan and operates out of bases in Pakistan's North Waziristan.

The group rose to prominence in Afghanistan during the 1980s, receiving weapons and funds from the CIA and Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet occupation. It has had long-standing links with Pakistan's military Inter-Services Intelligence, the country's main intelligence agency.

The U.S. move could worsen relations between the United States and Pakistan, already strained by the U.S. attack that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and by U.S. accusations that Pakistan does too little to fight militants.

The top U.S. military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, told a Pakistani television network on April 20 that the Pakistani intelligence agency still had connections with the Haqqani network.

The United States has presented evidence to Pakistan about what it sees as the growing threat from the network, including its alleged involvement in a string of bombings, among them one that targeted the main NATO air base at Bagram in Afghanistan.

The State Department described Badruddin Haqqani as an operational commander for the network, which it said was at the forefront of insurgent activity in Afghanistan and responsible for many high-profile attacks.

 

(Editing by Peter Cooney)

    U.S. moves to freeze assets of Pakistani militant, R, 11.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/11/us-usa-pakistan-haqqani-idUSTRE74A75T20110511

Pressure mounts

on Pakistan's military

over bin Laden

ISLAMABAD | Wed May 11, 2011
1:45pm EDT
Reuters
By Kamran Haider

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan's opposition leader accused the powerful spy agency of negligence and incompetence on Wednesday as the country's former president said rogue members of the security establishment may have helped Osama bin Laden hide for years near Islamabad.

Ratcheting up pressure on the country's military as it fights off suspicion that it sheltered the al Qaeda leader, rival India named five Pakistani army officers in a list of 50 criminals it wants extradited to stand trial on terror charges.

Nawaz Sharif, who heads Pakistan's largest opposition group, rejected a government decision to put an army general in charge of the inquiry into intelligence lapses that led to the killing of bin Laden in a helicopter raid by U.S. commandos on May 2.

Sparing the government and its leaders in his tirade over the surprise breach of Pakistan's sovereignty by American forces, Sharif said is the "worst case of negligence and incompetence" by the country's security agencies.

"It is matter of serious concern that our security institutions knew nothing when the helicopter gunships and commandos remained in our territory and airspace for so long," he told a news conference, calling for a judicial commission to lead the investigation to dispel doubts about its objectivity.

Sharif also demanded how it was that the world's most wanted man could be holed up in a compound less than a kilometer from the country's main military academy, and bemoaned the damage that the incident had caused to Pakistan's reputation abroad.

"Isn't it true that world considers us as a country that abets and exports terrorism?" he said. "Isn't it true that all crimes everywhere in the world have links with our home?"

ROGUE OFFICERS MIGHT HAVE KNOWN

Former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, an army general who seized power in 1999 and now lives in exile in London, told the ABC News network that there was a possibility that rogue junior officers in the country's intelligence and military might have been aware of bin Laden's whereabouts for years.

"It's really appalling that he was there and nobody knew," he said. "But rogue element within is a possibility. The possibility ... (is that there was), at the lower level, somebody following a policy of his own and violating the policy from above."

The country's pervasive Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency has a long history of contacts with Islamist militants.

Pakistan rejects allegations that it was either incompetent in tracking down the man behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States or complicit in hiding him in the town of Abbottabad just 50 km (30 miles) from Islamabad.

"We wouldn't be naive enough to be complicit in this affair. We would be risking not only the future of our country, but also the future of our children," a senior security official said, adding that if there was a support network protecting bin Laden it did not come from within the security establishment.

KERRY HEADS TO PAKISTAN TO SOOTHE FURY

America's secret raid on bin Laden's compound has embarrassed and enraged Pakistan's military and has added to strains between Washington and Islamabad that were already running high.

The security official said the Navy SEALs operation had left the army and the ISI "discredited in the eyes of the public".

"We are very angry about this breach of trust," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The space for cooperating with the Americans on military and intelligence operations has been shrunk because of this incident."

Pakistani cooperation is crucial for Washington's efforts to combat Islamist militants and bring stability to Afghanistan, and the U.S. administration's decision on Tuesday to send Senator John Kerry to Islamabad suggests it is keen to contain the fallout.

Kerry, a Democrat who is close to the Obama administration, is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Co-author of a 2009 bill that tripled non-military aid to Islamabad, he is seen as a friend of Pakistan.

Nevertheless, U.S. lawmakers are questioning whether Pakistan is serious about fighting militants in the region, and some have called for a suspension of American aid to Islamabad.

INDIA'S "MOST-WANTED"

Compounding the pressure on the army on Wednesday, India for the first time directly accused a handful of serving Pakistani military officers of being involved with militancy. New Delhi's list of its 50 "most-wanted" criminals was handed to Islamabad in March, but its contents have only just been released.

New Delhi has long accused its arch-rival of harboring militants such as those behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people, who it says were supported by the ISI.

Militant factions, including al Qaeda, have vowed revenge for the killing of al Qaeda chief.

In what may be the first such demonstration of that, on Wednesday two men on a motorbike threw a couple of hand grenades at the Saudi Arabian consulate in the Pakistani city of Karachi. No one was hurt, police said.

Al Qaeda is violently opposed to the Saudi government but Karachi police said it was too early to say if the attack was linked to the death of the Saudi-born militant chief.

The United States is hoping to question the three wives of bin Laden who were left in the Abbottabad compound after the U.S. raid and are being detained, although Pakistani officials played down the possibility of any speedy access.

U.S. investigators, who have been sifting through a huge stash of material seized during the operation, believe the wives could help them trace bin Laden's movements and his network.

ABC News quoted Pakistani officials as saying that they were interested in studying the remains of a U.S. helicopter that crashed during the raid, which experts believe was a version of the Blackhawk modified with stealth features.

One official told the network that China, an ally of Pakistan, was interested in examining the remains of the helicopter and another said "We might let them take a look".

But Pakistani military officials dismissed the report saying there was no intention to give the wreckage to China, nor had China asked to see it.

"Someone's aiming to spread alarm," one official said.

(Writing by John Chalmers; Editing by Robert Birsel)

    Pressure mounts on Pakistan's military over bin Laden, R, 11.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/11/us-binladen-idUSTRE7410D320110511

Analysis:

bin Laden death

unlikely to weaken

Pakistan Taliban

ISLAMABAD | Wed May 11, 2011
5:43am EDT
By Rebecca Conway

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - The death of Osama bin Laden is unlikely to undermine the Pakistan Taliban, despite al Qaeda's links with the militants, and it may even embolden the fighters battling to bring the nuclear-armed state down.

In the decade that the world's most-wanted man was underground, al Qaeda established deep ties with militants in the Pashtun tribal belt bordering Afghanistan, including the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban, who claimed allegiance to bin Laden.

TTP spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said this week that ties between the Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan were unshaken and revenge would be exacted for bin Laden's death at the hand of U.S. commandos.

"We were united before, we share the same goals and we have the same enemies. Al Qaeda, Taliban, including all mujahedeen (holy warriors), will avenge the death of Osama bin Laden," Ehsan said by telephone from an undisclosed location.

While Pakistan has at times supported militants fighting in Afghanistan and the Indian part of disputed Kashmir, the Taliban are the sworn enemies of the security forces.

"The problem is not al Qadea, the problem is the Taliban," said a senior Arab diplomat in Islamabad. "The threat is that al Qaeda uses these local militants. They are the threat."

The Pakistani Taliban are predominantly ethnic Pashtuns from

semi-autonomous tribal lands on the Afghan border where radical Islam has for generations been a rallying cry in the fight against outsiders.

The area was a staging post for Muslim guerrillas, including bin Laden, battling Soviet forces in Afghanistan during the 1980s and a string of religious schools was built with Pakistani and Saudi support to churn out recruits.

It was after the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001, when Pakistani was pressed to back the U.S. campaign against militancy, that the Pakistani fighters began to see these armed forces as their enemy.

A bloody operation by the security forces to clear gunmen from a radical mosque in Islamabad in July 2007 was a watershed, enraging militants who ramped up their campaign of suicide bombs and other attacks and gradually took control of the Swat valley, northwest of the capital.

Pakistani security forces have launched offensives in different areas, securing places like Swat, but the estimated 30,000 to 35,000 Pakistani Taliban militants in a patchwork of factions still pose a formidable threat.

The militants have killed hundreds of pro-government tribal leaders in the northwest while showing they can hit the military not only at camps and posts in the provinces, but at its very heart with attacks on the army's headquarters and its powerful spy agency in the city of Rawalpindi.

IDEOLOGICAL UMBRELLA

Al Qaeda's influence on the Pakistani Taliban has been largely ideological, with little in the way of strategic support, and they have their own sources of funding enabling them to mount attacks independently.

"The over-arching ideology is provided by al Qaeda. That is the trans-national global jihadist agenda ... under the umbrella of al Qaeda various militant outfits are operating," said Abdul Basit, a researcher at the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies.

"Bin Laden's removal from the scene is not going to change the overall dynamics of the war on terror or Taliban militancy in a big way at all," he said.

U.S. Navy SEALs shot dead bin Laden on May 2 in his hideout in the town of Abbottabad in northern Pakistan. One of three wives detained by Pakistani authorities after the raid said bin Laden never left the high-walled compound.

That isolation over the years means his elimination now is unlikely to have much impact.

"He may have had contact with some of his people, but the fact that he was not interacting much I think means his capacity to organize attacks was not really great," said veteran Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai.

While the Pakistani Taliban have largely been a domestic threat, there have been signs that they want to expand the scope of their attacks under the al Qaeda banner.

A suicide bombing at a U.S. base in Afghanistan's Khost province in 2009, carried out by a Jordanian national, killed seven Central Intelligence Agency employees.

In video footage released after the attack, the bomber was shown sitting with Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, a stark illustration of growing links between the Pakistani insurgents and foreign militants.

The Pakistani-born American who tried to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square last year told a court he got bomb-making training and funding from the Pakistani Taliban.

"The Pakistani Taliban have been acting as a surrogate for al Qaeda, and they've been carrying out a lot of the training of these foreigners - the Americans, British, Germans - on behalf of al Qaeda," said Pakistani author and expert on militants Ahmed Rashid.

"There's this very close cooperation between the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda because they are the main protectors for al Qaeda in the tribal areas," he said.

Pakistan's civilian and the military have been embarrassed by the discovery of bin Laden hiding under their noses and they are facing a slide in relations with the United States as well as a barrage of domestic criticism.

The Pakistani Taliban, bent on revenge for bin Laden's killing, could see this as the perfect time to strike at a weak government already struggling with a chronic economic mess.

"The TTP will probably go on the attack, a renewed attack against Pakistan," said Hamid Gul, a former head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency which helped organize the Afghan war in the 1980s and later nurtured the Afghan Taliban.

"We will pay the price for it, unfortunately," Gul said, referring to bin Laden's killing.

 

(Editing by Robert Birsel)

    Analysis: bin Laden death unlikely to weaken Pakistan Taliban, R, 11.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/11/us-binladen-pakistan-taliban-idUSTRE74A1G720110511

U.S. warned Pakistan

it would come to get

bin Laden

Tue, May 10 2011
Reuters
By Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON (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)

    U.S. warned Pakistan it would come to get bin Laden, R, 10.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/10/us-binladen-usa-pakistan-idUSTRE74979220110510

Bin Laden Sons Say

U.S. Violated International Law

May 10, 2011
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — The adult sons of Osama bin Laden have lashed out at President Obama over their father’s death, accusing the United States of violating its basic legal principles by killing an unarmed man, shooting his family members and disposing of his body in the sea.

The statement said the family was asking why the leader of Al Qaeda “was not arrested and tried in a court of law so that truth is revealed to the people of the world.” Citing the trials of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, the statement questioned “the propriety of such assassination where not only international law has been blatantly violated,” but the principles of presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial were ignored.

“We maintain that arbitrary killing is not a solution to political problems,” the statement said, adding that “justice must be seen to be done.”

The statement, prepared at the direction of Omar bin Laden, a son who had publicly denounced his father’s terrorism, was provided to The New York Times by Jean Sasson, an American author who helped the younger Bin Laden write a 2009 memoir, “Growing Up bin Laden.” A shorter, slightly different statement was posted on a jihadist Web site Tuesday.

Omar bin Laden, 30, lived with his father in Afghanistan until 1999, when he left with his mother, Najwa bin Laden, who co-wrote the memoir. In the book and other public statements, the younger bin Laden denounced violence of all kinds, a stance he repeated in the sons’ statement to The Times. None of Osama bin Laden’s sons other than Omar was named in the statement, so it was unclear exactly who else had approved the message.

“We want to remind the world that Omar bin Laden, the fourth-born son of our father, always disagreed with our father regarding any violence and always sent messages to our father, that he must change his ways and that no civilians should be attacked under any circumstances,” the statement said. “Despite the difficulty of publicly disagreeing with our father, he never hesitated to condemn any violent attacks made by anyone, and expressed sorrow for the victims of any and all attacks.”

Condemning the shooting of one of the Qaeda leader’s wives during the assault on May 2 in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the statement added: “As he condemned our father, we now condemn the president of the United States for ordering the execution of unarmed men and women.”

The sons’ statement called on the government of Pakistan to hand over to family members the three wives and several children of the terrorist now believed to be in Pakistani custody and asked for a United Nations investigation of the circumstances of their father’s death.

In addition to the statement, Ms. Sasson shared with The Times notes on what Omar bin Laden, who declined to be interviewed directly, has told her by phone in recent days. The notes describe Mr. bin Laden’s struggle, as he came of age, to understand and eventually reject his father’s embrace of religious violence.

Mr. bin Laden told Ms. Sasson the death of his father “has affected this family in much the same way as many other families in the past in the loss of a family member.”

    Bin Laden Sons Say U.S. Violated International Law, R, 10.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/world/asia/11binladen.html

Statement From the Family

of Osama bin Laden

May 10, 2011
The New York Times

Statement from the family of Sheikh Osama bin Laden

I Omar Ossama Binladin and my brothers the lawful children and heirs of the Ossama Binladin (OBL) have noted wide coverage of the news of the death of our father, but we are not convinced on the available evidence in the absence of dead body, photographs, and video evidence that our natural father is dead. Therefore, with this press statement, we seek such conclusive evidence to believe the stories published in relation to 2 May 2011 operation Geronimo as declared by the President of United States Barrack Hussein Obama in his speech that he authorized the said operation and killing of OBL and later confirmed his death.

If OBL has been killed in that operation as President of United States has claimed then we are just in questioning as per media reports that why an unarmed man was not arrested and tried in a court of law so that truth is revealed to the people of the world. If he has been summarily executed then, we question the propriety of such assassination where not only international law has been blatantly violated but USA has set a very different example whereby right to have a fair trial, and presumption of innocence until proven guilty by a court of law has been sacrificed on which western society is built and is standing when a trial of OBL was possible for any wrongdoing as that of Iraqi President Sadam Hussein and Serbian President Slobodan Miloševic'. We maintain that arbitrary killing is not a solution to political problems and crime's adjudication as Justice must be seen to be done.

It is also unworthy of the special forces to shoot unarmed female family members of Binladen killing a female and that of one of his son.

Most importantly, when it is a common knowledge that OBL's family is residing at one place outside KSA, why they were not contacted to receive his dead body. His sudden and un witnessed burial at sea has deprived the family of performing religious rights of a Muslim man.

Finally, now that the operation is concluded we wish the Government of Pakistan to release and hand over all minors of the family and all the family members are reunited at one place and are repatriated to their country of origin, especially female members of the family to avoid further oppression and we seek international support to that effect.

Without agreeing to the ways of OBL as to how he professed, believed and operated, We Omar Ossama Binladin, and my brothers, the lawful children of the Ossama Binladin (OBL) herewith demand an inquiry under UNO to reach to the accuracy of the facts as stated by United States into the fundamental question as to why our father was not arrested and tried but summarily executed without a court of law. We are putting these questions to the United Nations, OIC, President of United States that a necessary evidence is presented to the family in private and or public to make us believe what they claim, and all the remaining family members are repatriated and united after necessary initial investigation.

In making this statement, we want to remind the world that Omar Ossam Binladin, the fourth-born son of our father, always disagreed with our father regarding any violence and always sent messages to our father, that he must change his ways and that no civilians should be attacked under any circumstances. Despite the difficulty of publicly disagreeing with our father, he never hesitated to condemn any violent attacks made by anyone, and expressed sorrow for the victims of any and all attacks. As he condemned our father, we now condemn the president of the United States for ordering the execution of unarmed men and women.

Failure to answer these questions will force us to go to International forum for justice such as International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice and UN must take notice of the violation of international law and assist us to have answers for which we are lawful in seeking them. A panel of eminent British and international lawyers is being constituted and a necessary action may be taken if no answers are furnished within 30 days of this statement.

    Statement From the Family of Osama bin Laden, NYT, 10.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/world/asia/binladen-statement.html

Scenarios: Bin Laden's secret years;

where was he and who knew?

Tue, May 10 2011
ISLAMABAD | Tue May 10, 2011
8:56am EDT
By Robert Birsel

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - U.S. investigators are trying to put together the pieces of Osama bin Laden's secret life in the hope of unearthing details of his global network of Islamist militants bent on attacking the West.

Key to that will be tracing his movements from the weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States to last week, when U.S. special forces killed him after discovering him hiding in a compound in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad.

Efforts to trace his movements over the decade are likely to shed light on who helped him, and that could prove highly embarrassing to U.S. ally Pakistan which has rejected as absurd accusations it was either incompetent or playing a double game.

Following are some possible explanations for how bin Laden ended up under the noses of the Pakistani authorities, in a compound with high walls topped with barbed wire, a short distance from the country's top military academy.

 

HE WAS ON HIS OWN

Pakistan has rejected any suggestion of involvement in bin Laden's lost years. That would mean he was on his own and managed to slip into Pakistan from Afghanistan in late December 2001 undetected, and remained hidden with a handful of aides and relatives from the eyes of the authorities, including the pervasive security agencies.

Pakistani investigators, questioning bin Laden's three wives who were found in the compound after the May 2 raid, said the women had told them bin Laden had been hiding in the compound for the past five years, and previously he had spent two-and-a-half years in the nearby village of Chak Shah Mohammad. Reporters could find no trace of bin Laden there.

A move to Abbottabad in 2006 would suggest he felt compelled to leave wherever he had been. It was in January 2006 that the CIA began its campaign of attacks by missile-firing drone aircraft on militants sheltering in lawless Pashtun tribal lands on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border, with a deadly strike on Damadola village, in the Bajaur region.

Another possibility is that bin Laden felt compelled to move after an earthquake in October 2005 killed 73,000 people. The U.S. military and other Western armies sent forces to help with rescue efforts in northern mountains, including the Pakistani part of the Kashmir region where various militant groups operate. Had bin Laden been holed up in the disaster zone, he might have felt it safer to move somewhere like Abbottabad, which was not badly hit and not the focus of foreign attention.

Whatever his movements, the fact he went undetected for at least five years in Pakistan suggests an intelligence failure. Abbottabad is a garrison town where military commanders come and go.

Residents in the neighborhood thought the behavior of the occupants of the bin Laden compound strange, particularly that about 16 children living there were schooled at home and never allowed out on their own. Did such behavior never rouse the curiosity of security agents, especially those responsible for the safety of the top brass on their comings and goings to the nearby military academy?

 

PAKISTAN KNEW EVERYTHING

Analysts find it hard to believe Pakistani leaders were sheltering the chief of a group whose members were trying to kill them.

Former military leader and president Pervez Musharraf narrowly survived two bomb attacks carried out by al Qaeda-linked militants while his prime minister survived one. Security forces, including the main Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, have been repeatedly attacked by bin Laden's followers, losing thousands of men.

It seems inconceivable that there was any formal government decision to shelter bin Laden, especially one made by a civilian government that took power in 2008, or that government leaders had any clue about him.

But in a country that has been ruled by the military for more than half its 64 years of history, such sensitive issues are anyway the exclusive domain of the military/security establishment.

 

ROGUE OR RETIRED SECURITY AGENTS HELPED HIM

The truth almost undoubtedly lies somewhere in the murky void between the scenario that Pakistan authorities knew nothing and knew everything.

It's conceivable that in the fraught weeks after the September 11 attacks, the world's most wanted man slipped across the border from Afghanistan to escape U.S. bombs and someone decided it was in Pakistan's national interest to hold the "asset".

Security agents could have set up an independent team outside the chain of command to watch over the al Qaeda leader. That could have given Pakistan's security establishment the best of both worlds - plausible deniability and an asset of unmatched value.

Or rogue or retired security agents could have decided that in defiance of the country's official policy to join the United States in the global campaign against militancy, it was in Pakistan's national interest to hold him. They could have let the al Qaeda leader hide under the noses of the military, and under their watch, in the garrison town.

It was only a chance phone call, intercepted by a Pakistani security team probably with no idea of any link to bin Laden, or to his handlers, and passed on to the United States, that led the CIA on its secret mission to his lair.

 

WHY?

The answer to why some Pakistanis might have thought it wise to hold the man some of whose followers are battling the Pakistani state could probably be found in the country's obsessive suspicion of its nuclear-armed rival, India.

Pakistan has no interest in bin Laden's global holy war but the defense against perceived Indian aggression drives strategic thinking, and militants have regularly been used against India and its influence in the region.

No matter that some al Qaeda followers were battling Pakistan, if others were willing and able to fight India, perhaps it was seen as best to hold their inspirational leader.

Or perhaps some Pakistanis thought bin Laden could have been an ace to offer the United States the next time war with India loomed.

Or perhaps some Pakistanis thought U.S. engagement with Pakistan, its influence with India on Pakistan's behalf, and its billions of dollars in aid, would end once the Americans had caught their enemy number one.

 

(Editing by John Chalmers)

    Scenarios: Bin Laden's secret years; where was he and who knew?, R, 10.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/10/us-binladen-questions-idUSTRE7492ZJ20110510

Pakistan may let U.S.

question bin Laden wives

SLAMABAD/WASHINGTON | Tue May 10, 2011
6:06am EDT
Reuters
By Kamran Haider and Mark Hosenball

ISLAMABAD/WASHINGTON (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 stabilize relations between the prickly allies that have been severely strained by the killing of the al Qaeda leader.

However, senior Pakistani government officials 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.

In a reminder of Pakistan's own struggle against al Qaeda-linked militants, a bomb outside a court in the northwestern town of Nowshera killed a policewoman.

"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.

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.

Pakistan has launched its own investigation and the military is due to brief parliament in a closed session on Friday.

(Editing by Robert Birsel and Sanjeev Miglani)

    Pakistan may let U.S. question bin Laden wives, R, 10.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/10/us-binladen-idUSTRE7410D320110510

U.S. Was Braced for Fight

With Pakistanis in Bin Laden Raid

May 9, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT, THOM SHANKER and DAVID E. SANGER

This article is by Eric Schmitt, Thom Shanker and David E. Sanger.

WASHINGTON — President Obama insisted that the assault force hunting down Osama bin Laden last week be large enough to fight its way out of Pakistan if confronted by hostile local police officers and troops, senior administration and military officials said Monday.

In revealing additional details about planning for the mission, senior officials also said that two teams of specialists were on standby: One to bury Bin Laden if he was killed, and a second composed of lawyers, interrogators and translators in case he was captured alive. That team was set to meet aboard a Navy ship, most likely the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson in the North Arabian Sea.

Mr. Obama’s decision to increase the size of the force sent into Pakistan shows that he was willing to risk a military confrontation with a close ally in order to capture or kill the leader of Al Qaeda.

Such a fight would have set off an even larger breach with the Pakistanis than has taken place since officials in Islamabad learned that helicopters filled with members of a Navy Seals team had flown undetected into one of their cities, and burst into a compound where Bin Laden was hiding.

One senior Obama administration official, pressed on the rules of engagement for one of the riskiest clandestine operations attempted by the C.I.A. and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command in many years, said: “Their instructions were to avoid any confrontation if at all possible. But if they had to return fire to get out, they were authorized to do it.”

The planning also illustrates how little the administration trusted the Pakistanis as they set up their operation. They also rejected a proposal to bring the Pakistanis in on the mission.

Under the original plan, two assault helicopters were going to stay on the Afghanistan side of the border waiting for a call if they were needed. But the aircraft would have been about 90 minutes away from the Bin Laden compound.

About 10 days before the raid, Mr. Obama reviewed the plans and pressed his commanders as to whether they were taking along enough forces to fight their way out if the Pakistanis arrived on the scene and tried to interfere with the operation.

That resulted in the decision to send two more helicopters carrying additional troops. These followed the two lead Black Hawk helicopters that carried the actual assault team. While there was no confrontation with the Pakistanis, one of those backup helicopters was ultimately brought in to the scene of the raid when a Black Hawk was damaged while making a hard landing.

“Some people may have assumed we could talk our way out of a jam, but given our difficult relationship with Pakistan right now, the president did not want to leave anything to chance,” said one senior administration official, who like others would not be quoted by name describing details of the secret mission. “He wanted extra forces if they were necessary.”

With tensions between the United States and Pakistan escalating since the raid, American officials on Monday sought to tamp down the divisions and pointed to some encouraging developments.

A United States official said that American investigators would soon be allowed to interview Bin Laden’s three widows, now being held by Pakistani authorities, a demand that Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, made on television talk shows on Sunday.

American officials say the widows, as well as a review of the trove of documents and other data the Seals team collected from the raid, could reveal important details, not only about Bin Laden’s life and activities since he fled into Pakistan from Afghanistan in 2001, but also information about Qaeda plots, personnel and planning.

“We believe that it is very important to maintain the cooperative relationship with Pakistan precisely because it’s in our national security interest to do so,” said the White House spokesman, Jay Carney.

In an effort to help mend the latest rupture in relations, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, will talk soon with his counterpart, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, head of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, “to discuss the way forward in the common fight against Al Qaeda,” an American official said.

On Sunday, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. “Mullen just wanted to check in with him,” said an American military official. “The conversation was civil, but sober, given the pressure that the general is under right now.”

In describing the mission, the officials said that American surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft were watching and listening to how Pakistan’s police forces and military responded to the raid. That determined how long the commandos could safely remain on the ground going through the compound collecting computer hard drives, thumb drives and documents.

American forces were under strict orders to avoid engaging with any Pakistani forces that responded to the commotion at the Bin Laden compound, senior administration officials said.

If a confrontation appeared imminent, there were contingency plans for senior American officials, including Admiral Mullen, to call their Pakistani counterparts to avert an armed clash.

But when he reviewed the plans, Mr. Obama voiced concern that this was not enough to protect the troops on the mission, administration officials said.

In planning for the possible capture of Bin Laden, officials decided they would take him aboard a Navy ship to preclude battles over jurisdiction.

The plan, officials said, was to do an initial interrogation for any information that might prevent a pending attack or identify the location of other Qaeda leaders.

“There was a heck of a lot of planning that went into this for almost any and all contingencies, including capture,” one senior administration official said.

In the end, the team organized to handle his death was called into duty. They did a quick forensics study of the body, washed it, and buried it at sea.

But the officials acknowledged that the mission always was weighted toward killing, given the possibility that Bin Laden would be armed or wearing an explosive vest.

    U.S. Was Braced for Fight With Pakistanis in Bin Laden Raid, NYT, 9.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/world/asia/10intel.html

Bin Laden Aftermath:

A Rush of Emotion

May 9, 2011
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Killing Evil Doesn’t Make Us Evil” (column, May 8):

Thanks to Maureen Dowd for getting it exactly right. Those who bemoan Osama bin Laden’s death as unjustified are naïve at best, or may be far removed from anyone who experienced a loss on 9/11.

That September morning neither I nor my children knew whether their father, who worked at 7 World Trade Center, was alive or dead. A woman I worked with rushed home because her daughter, knowing she was about to die in the conflagration, had made an anguished phone call to say goodbye. Children of a family I knew were left without a father. Thankfully, mine were not.

While the eruption of spontaneous celebrations after Bin Laden’s killing may have disturbed many, I believe that the outpouring came from a sense of profound relief that someone who had threatened their lives every day for 10 years had finally been dealt a measure of justice.

So please let us stop the collective handwringing and thank those responsible for removing Bin Laden from our midst — the Navy Seals and President Obama, who made a brave decision.

DOLORES SOFFIENTINI
Holmdel, N.J., May 8, 2011

To the Editor:

Killing evil does not, indeed, make us evil, but could we not have reached this same end without leaving so many bodies strewn along the path to justice?

Measured intelligence and leadership from President Obama were key. Just as important were intelligence gathering in the field and synthesis of that knowledge. Finally, precision by a small team in carrying out the surgical strike enabled by that intelligence brought fruition to the 10-year manhunt.

One can only wonder, however, if after 9/11 we had focused exclusively on the criminal investigation— including the gathering, sharing and synthesis of information — could two wars, about 6,000 American deaths, over 30,000 casualties, and many more Afghan and Iraqi deaths have been avoided?

Did we really need to obliterate Afghanistan and Iraq to get the guy who committed mass murder on Sept. 11?

JOHN E. COLBERT
Chicago, May 8, 2011

To the Editor:

As a lawyer who takes the rule of law quite seriously, I was thankful that Maureen Dowd showed common sense in her thoughtful discussion of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden was a proud, self-appointed mass murderer of civilians, including women and children. He proclaimed his own guilt for crimes against humanity and openly planned to continue these heinous acts. What kind of society, what kind of morality, leads us to question the necessity of ending such a person’s existence?

On rare occasions the death of one’s blood enemy may be a justified cause of celebration. While I did not join the understandable public celebrations of Bin Laden’s death, they brought me considerable satisfaction.

WILLIAM WINSTON NEWBILL
Dallas, May 8, 2011

To the Editor:

Re “Killing Evil Doesn’t Make Us Evil,” by Maureen Dowd, and “Why We Celebrate a Killing,” by Jonathan Haidt (Op-Ed, May 8):

As someone who experienced 9/11 from my home about a mile from the World Trade Center, I can honestly say I felt no jubilation when I heard the news of Bin Laden’s death. Instead, all the sadness of that dreadful day came back.

The killing seemed to me yet another part of what Robert Klitzman, the brother of a 9/11 victim, has called the “never-ending cycle of destruction” (“My Sister, My Grief,” Op-Ed, May 4). Whether or not the killing of Bin Laden was a good tactical move, or a moral act, you have to wonder at the depravity in the way human beings deal with one another. It’s nothing to cheer about.

MARY LYN MAISCOTT
New York, May 8, 2011

To the Editor:

Jonathan Haidt fairly distinguishes patriotism and love for country from a more racist and hostile brand of nationalism. It may be that the flag-waving college students in front of the White House and in Times Square were simply rejoicing in their “desire to show solidarity with fellow citizens.” The line between patriotism and nationalism is, however, much thinner than Mr. Haidt implies.

We must remember how quickly the common purpose that followed 9/11 — the flags, the memorials and candlelight vigils — quickly devolved into an environment of fear, an erosion of civil liberties and an ugly rush to invade a sovereign nation on the basis of shoddy intelligence.

Those who were unnerved by the celebratory reaction to Osama bin Laden’s death are not only moved by their moral conscience, but also recall just how fast our patriotism can lead to paranoia, xenophobia and war.

ADAM ESRIG
Brooklyn, May 9, 2011

To the Editor:

According to Jonathan Haidt, those of us who were appalled by the celebrations of the killing of Osama bin Laden have got it all wrong. The revelers in these gruesome spectacles were not expressing hate, he says, but altruism, which is to say empathy and love. The basis for this surprising claim is that human beings share with certain insects — the bee, the ant, the termite — the remarkable capacity to sacrifice self-interest for unity and group defense.

I wonder where that leaves all of us who did not rush out to join the crowds of mostly college students that night, but watched at home with embarrassment and dismay. Selfish, I guess. But are we more or less like bugs for thinking that, surely, there is still a difference between justice and revenge, and human and animal behavior?

SEAN KEILEN
San Francisco, May 8, 2011

    Bin Laden Aftermath: A Rush of Emotion, R, 9.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/opinion/l10binladen.html

Pakistan PM

rejects accusations

over bin Laden

ISLAMABAD | Mon May 9, 2011
7:09pm EDT
Reuters
By John Chalmers

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani rejected allegations on Monday that the killing of Osama bin Laden near Islamabad by U.S. forces showed Pakistani incompetence or complicity in hiding the al Qaeda leader.

Opposition politicians have stepped up their criticism of Pakistan's leaders over the killing of bin Laden in a raid by U.S. special forces in a northern Pakistani town on May 2.

Pakistan welcomed the death of bin Laden, who plotted the September 11, 2001, airliner attacks on the United States, as a step in the fight against militancy but also complained the raid violated its sovereignty.

The fact that bin Laden was found hiding in the garrison town of Abbottabad, 50 km (30 miles) from the capital, has led to accusations that Pakistani security agencies were either incompetent or sheltering the world's most wanted man.

"Allegations of complicity or incompetence are absurd," Gilani said in a televised address to parliament, adding that it was disingenuous for anyone to accuse Pakistan, including its spy agency, of "being in cahoots" with the al Qaeda network.

The U.S. raid has added to strains in ties between Islamabad and Washington, which are crucial to combating Islamist militants and to bringing stability to Afghanistan.

The United States wants Pakistan to grant access to bin Laden's three wives to gain more information about al Qaeda, White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Monday. The wives were at the compound when the U.S. team swooped in and have been detained by Pakistan.

But Carney also said fallout from the bin Laden operation should not hurt U.S.-Pakistani relations.

"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," Carney told a briefing.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said Western governments had "no alternative" to cooperating with Pakistan in the fight against Islamic militants.

"My bottom line is that we need strong cooperation with Pakistan. 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.

The United States has stopped short of accusing Pakistan of providing shelter to bin Laden, but Islamabad is under pressure to explain how bin Laden found refuge.

Gilani warned that unilateral actions such as the U.S. Navy SEALs raid on bin Laden's hide-out risked serious consequences, but he added that Pakistan placed high importance on its relations with the United States.

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.

"I think it is a big blow to Pakistan's sovereignty, Pakistan's independence and Pakistan's self-respect," former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told reporters in Lahore. "Pakistan is in a grave crisis and is surrounded by big danger."

But the White House expressed no regrets about the bin Laden raid.

"We obviously take the statements and concerns of the Pakistani government seriously, but we also do not apologize for the action that we took -- that this president took," Carney said.

Domestic critics say the U.S. raid also raises questions about the safety of Pakistan's cherished nuclear weapons, but Gilani said any move against them would be met with "a matching response."

"Pakistan reserves the right to retaliate with full force," he said.

 

TENSE RELATIONS WITH WASHINGTON

Pakistani-U.S. relations were already fragile 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 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 that the real 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.

Last year, after the chief of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency 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.

The government and military have been embarrassed by the discovery of bin Laden in Abbottabad, near the country's main military academy.

"If he was really living in that compound for five years ... then why didn't our agencies discover him?" former Foreign Minister Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri told reporters. "This has given anti-Pakistani elements a chance to ridicule us."

But Gilani said he had full confidence in the armed forces and the military's ISI which he called a "national asset." The military would brief parliament in a closed session Friday.

 

OBAMA SUSPECTS SUPPORT NETWORK

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.

"We think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan. But we don't know who or what that support network was," Obama said.

"We don't know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that's something that we have to investigate, and more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate," he added.

Suspicion has deepened that the pervasive ISI, which has a long history of contacts with militant groups, may have had ties with the al Qaeda leader, or that some of its agents did.

Some Pakistani analysts suspect powerful figures knew where bin Laden was hiding.

"Somebody in a position of authority had to know," said security analyst Ayesha Siddiqa.

Siddiqa said the army and ISI's entrenched strategy of using violent militant groups as a counterweight against India may have been why the security establishment turned a blind eye to bin Laden, possibly regarding his network of followers as an asset against Indian influence.

 

(Additional reporting by Augustine Anthony, Kamran Haider, Michael Georgy and Chris Allbritton in Islamabad, Donna Smith, Steve Holland and Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Editing by Robert Birsel and Eric Beech)

    Pakistan PM rejects accusations over bin Laden, R, 9.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/09/us-binladen-idUSTRE7410D320110509

Analysis:

Intelligence find

may reveal

bin Laden's true role

LONDON | Mon May 9, 2011
12:36pm EDT
Reuters
By William Maclean, Security Correspondent

LONDON (Reuters) - Al Qaeda documents captured in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden will give Western intelligence a clearer idea of the threat he posed, and may help settle the latest bad-tempered spat between Washington and Islamabad.

There was derision in Pakistan Sunday at a suggestion by an unnamed U.S. official that bin Laden's Abbottabad compound was an "active command and control center" for al Qaeda. One senior Pakistan security official dismissed that as nonsense.

Pakistan's view of bin Laden as an out-of-touch figurehead seems to chime with videos seized at his hideout which show a forlorn figure surfing satellite television, seemingly to check if he still makes the news.

But a fuller picture may become known in coming months, for the May 2 assault that killed him also netted computer disks which are expected to provide a trove of intelligence on his role.

The investigation into this material has urgent importance because the process of tracing bin Laden's links to his colleagues may give clues to their whereabouts and so help Western efforts to capture or kill them.

The probe may also uncover the existence of attack plots under way, and show the extent of bin Laden's relationships with militant groups inside Pakistan that are presumed to have given sanctuary at some point to the global militant figurehead.

Definitive answers are not likely to come rapidly.

John J. LeBeau, a former CIA senior operations officer, said it was simply too early to say with certainty what bin Laden's role was in his final years. Analysis was a painstaking process.

"The information needs to be filtered, vetted and cross-checked before you can say anything with any authority," said LeBeau, now Professor of Security Studies at the George C. Marshall Center for Security Studies in Germany.

DOUBTS ABOUT BIN LADEN ROLE

"Bin Laden didn't intend to simply remain hidden away from the threat of capture. He sought to retain the ability to keep strategic oversight on activities," he told Reuters.

"But how far he was able to influence actions on a day to day basis, that jury is out."

A key unknown is how frequently, if at all, bin Laden was in contact with the head of the core leadership's external operations, variously reported to be Adnan al-Shukrijumah, a Saudi-born Guyanese in his 30s, Saif al-Adel, an Egyptian al Qaeda veteran, or the Pakistani militant Ilyas Kashmiri.

Western intelligence about al Qaeda's senior leadership has been thin and fragmentary for much of the period since the September 11, 2001 attacks, and this is especially true of cells working on operations, the most compartmentalized part of the group.

Partly as a result, security experts have tended to react cautiously to categorical-sounding statements about bin Laden in the wake of the raid. Changes to the American account of the attack have only served to deepen such reservations.

Pakistani investigators are cultivating their own new sources of information about bin Laden by questioning the people, including one of his wives, held in the raid.

AL QAEDA'S WORKINGS REMAIN A PUZZLE

Among security analysts there has been a widespread belief, based in part on intercepted communications from al Qaeda supporters, that bin Laden had chafed at the limitations of his enforced hiding and longed to mount another spectacular attack on the United States.

Most analysts have suspected that he adapted to this reality by encouraging the creation of allies around the world that operated tactically without him.

The captured intelligence is likely to give a fuller picture of core al Qaeda's way of working with these allies, today found in the Gulf, North Africa, East Africa and the Middle East.

How exactly the network functions remains a puzzle.

Henry Wilkinson, a senior analyst at London-based Janusian risk advisory group, said the practice of swearing loyalty to Osama bin Laden appeared to obviate, to a degree, the need for a hierarchy that would hand orders down a chain of command.

JUMBLED LINES OF AUTHORITY?

If bin Laden issued a statement declaring a particular community or group to be a legitimate target, a far-flung affiliate was at liberty to attack that target -- for example people of a particular nationality -- if such people were to be found within its geographic area of operation.

At times lines of authority seem jumbled.

In its Foresight 2011 publication, London-based Exclusive Analysis notes occasions when an affiliate adopted a new target before core al Qaeda endorsed it.

An example is the statement by al Qaeda ideological authority Abu Yahia al-Libi in October 2009 in support of Uighur Muslims in China when he condemned China as an enemy of Islam following Uighur riots in July of that year.

The statement was published only after rank and file al Qaeda supporters around the world posed questions to forums suggesting al Qaeda should open hostilities against China.

Leah Farrall, a leading analyst of al Qaeda's structure, wrote in Foreign Affairs earlier this year that personal ties were influential.

"Al Qaeda today is not a traditional hierarchical terrorist organization ... and it does not exercise full command and control over its branch and franchises," she wrote.

"But nor is its role limited to broad ideological influence," she said, adding that "levels of command authority are not always clear; personal ties between militants carry weight and, at times, transcend the command structure ..."

 

(Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

    Analysis: Intelligence find may reveal bin Laden's true role, R, 9.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/09/us-binladen-qaeda-role-idUSTRE74831E20110509

Under fire,

Pakistan's PM

to address nation

on bin Laden death

ISLAMABAD | Mon May 9, 2011
5:41am EDT
Reuters
By John Chalmers

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Political rivals took aim at Pakistan's leaders on Monday over the killing of Osama bin Laden, compounding U.S. pressure over the al Qaeda leader's hideout, as the prime minister prepared to address parliament on the crisis for the first time.

Pakistan's main opposition party is stepping up calls for the prime minister and president to resign over the breach of sovereignty by U.S. special forces who slipped in from Afghanistan to storm the compound where bin Laden was holed up.

"We want resignations, not half-baked explanations," an official of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League told the News daily.

Pakistan welcomed the death of bin Laden, who plotted the September 11, 2001, airliner attacks on the United States, as a step in the fight against militancy but also complained that the U.S. helicopter raid to kill him was a violation of its sovereignty.

Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, who will make his statement when parliament sits at 1200 GMT, is expected to deliver a stern warning against further military missions inside Pakistan by foreign forces.

The incident has added to strains in ties between Islamabad and Washington, which are crucial to combating Islamist militants and the war in Afghanistan.

 

TENSE RELATIONS WITH WASHINGTON

Relations were already fragile after a string of diplomatic disputes over issues including a big attack by a U.S. drone aircraft in March and Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who shot dead two Pakistanis in the city of Lahore in January.

Potentially stirring tension further, a Pakistani TV channel and a newspaper published what they said was the name of the undercover CIA station chief in Islamabad.

The U.S. embassy declined to comment, but said no one of that name worked at the mission in Pakistan.

Last year, after the chief of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency 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 he was forced to leave the country.

Islamabad has been embarrassed by the discovery of the world's most-wanted man in a high-walled compound in Abbottabad town, just 50 km (30 miles) north of the capital and a short distance from Pakistan's main military academy. It has led to accusations of either incompetence on the part of its intelligence service, or complicity in sheltering him.

"If he was really living in that compound for five years ... then why didn't our agencies discover him?" former foreign minister Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri told reporters. "This has given anti-Pakistani elements a chance to ridicule us."

Gilani has blamed bin Laden's evasion of capture for nearly a decade since the September 11 attacks on a "global intelligence failure," and the United States has stopped short of accusing Pakistan of providing shelter to bin Laden.

 

OBAMA SUSPECTS SUPPORT NETWORK

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 just what the nature of that support was.

"We think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan. But we don't know who or what that support network was," Obama said. [nN08167915]

"We don't know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that's something that we have to investigate, and more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate," he added.

The government's opponents at home are incensed more about the humiliation of an unannounced swoop by helicopter-borne foreign forces in Pakistan than they are about the possibility that establishment insiders knew where bin Laden was hiding.

"I think it is a big blow to Pakistan's sovereignty, Pakistan's independence and Pakistan's self-respect," former prime minister Sharif told reporters in Lahore. "Pakistan is in a grave crisis and is surrounded by big danger."

Suspicion has deepened that the pervasive ISI, which has a long history of contacts with militant groups, may have had ties with the al Qaeda leader -- or that some of its agents did.

Talat Masood, a retired general and defense analyst, said that if there was official collusion to keep bin Laden secure it was most likely provided at a local level.

"I feel definitely there were influential people who were protecting him," he told Reuters. "I believe there was real ignorance at the highest level but there was collusion at the local level."

 

DOUBTS ABOUT BIN LADEN'S INFLUENCE

Pakistani security officials reacted with skepticism to a U.S. assertion that bin Laden was actively engaged in directing his far-flung network from his Abbottabad compound.

Washington has said that, based on a trove of information that would fill a small college library seized in the raid, the hide-out was an "active command and control center" for al Qaeda where he was involved in plotting attacks on the United States.

Pakistani officials said the fact that there was no Internet connection or even telephone line into the compound where he was hiding raised doubts about his centrality to al Qaeda.

"It sounds ridiculous," said a senior Pakistani intelligence official. "It doesn't sound like he was running a terror network."

Analysts have long maintained that, years before bin Laden's death, al Qaeda had fragmented into a decentralized group that operated tactically without him.

(Additional reporting by Augustine Anthony and Chris Allbritton in Islamabad, Donna Smith and Steve Holland in Washington; Editing by Robert Birsel)

    Under fire, Pakistan's PM to address nation on bin Laden death, R, 9.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/09/us-binladen-idUSTRE7410D320110509

Bin Laden

had support network

in Pakistan:

Obama

Sun, May 8 2011
WASHINGTON/ISLAMABAD | Sun May 8, 2011
7:07pm EDT
By Donna Smith and Zeeshan Haider

WASHINGTON/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden likely had "some sort" of a support network inside Pakistan, President Barack Obama said on Sunday, but added it will take investigations by Pakistan and the United States to find out the nature of that support.

Obama's interview on CBS's "60 Minutes" program comes a week after bin Laden was killed by U.S. commandos in a garrison town a short drive from Islamabad, raising questions about whether Pakistan's government had known of the al Qaeda leader's whereabouts.

"We think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan. But we don't know who or what that support network was," Obama said.

"We don't know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that's something that we have to investigate, and more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate," he added.

Asked whether he did not warn the Pakistani government or the military, or even the Pakistani intelligence community, of the impending raid, because he did not trust them, Obama replied:

"I didn't tell most people here in the White House. I didn't tell my own family. It was that important for us to maintain operational security. If I'm not revealing to some of my closest aides what we're doing, then I sure as heck am not going to be revealing it to folks who I don't know."

Obama said he agonized over the decision to go ahead with the mission for fear of the loss of American life and because it was inside sovereign Pakistan.

"And so if it turns out that it's a wealthy, you know, prince from Dubai who's in this compound and, you know, we've sent special forces in -- we've got problems," he said.

But he added: "The one thing I didn't lose sleep over was the possibility of taking bin Laden out. Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil -- didn't deserve what he got needs to have their head examined."

Pakistan's government has "indicated they have a profound interest in finding out what kinds of support networks bin Laden might have had," Obama said. "But ... it's going to take some time for us to be able to exploit the intelligence that we were able to gather on site."

'JIHADI HAS-BEENS'

Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani is scheduled to "take the nation into confidence" in parliament on Monday, his first statement to the people more than a week after the attack on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, 30 miles north of Islamabad, embarrassed the country and raised fears of a new rift between Islamabad and Washington.

Suspicion has deepened that Pakistan's pervasive Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, which has a long history of contacts with militant groups, may have had ties with the al Qaeda leader -- or that some of its agents did.

Pakistan has dismissed such suggestions and says it has paid the highest price in human life and money supporting the U.S. war on militancy launched after bin Laden's followers staged the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, told ABC's "This Week" program his government would act on the results of the investigation.

"And heads will roll, once the investigation has been completed. Now, if those heads are rolled on account of incompetence, we will share that information with you. And if, God forbid, somebody's complicity is discovered, there will be zero tolerance for that, as well."

The ambassador said Pakistan had "many Jihadi has-beens from the 1980s who are still alive and well and kicking, and some of them could have been helping them, but they are not in the state or government of Pakistan today."

DOUBTS ABOUT BIN LADEN'S INFLUENCE

Pakistani security officials reacted with skepticism to a U.S. assertion that bin Laden was actively engaged in directing his far-flung network from his compound in Abbottabad where he was killed on May 2.

Washington has said that, based on a trove of documents the size of a small college library and computer equipment seized in the raid, bin Laden's hide-out was an "active command and control center" for al Qaeda where he was involved in plotting future attacks on the United States.

Pakistani officials said the fact that there was no Internet connection or even telephone line into the compound where the world's most-wanted man was hiding raised doubts about his centrality to al Qaeda.

"It sounds ridiculous," said a senior Pakistani intelligence official. "It doesn't sound like he was running a terror network."

Analysts have long maintained that, years before bin Laden's death, al Qaeda had fragmented into a decentralized group that operated tactically without him.

On Saturday, the White House released five video clips of bin Laden taken from the compound, most of them showing the al Qaeda leader, his beard dyed black, evidently rehearsing the video-taped speeches he sometimes distributed to his followers.

None of the videos were released with sound. A U.S. intelligence official said it had been removed because the United States did not want to transmit bin Laden's propaganda. But he said they contained the usual criticism of the United States as well as capitalism.

While several video segments showed him rehearsing, one showed an aging and gray-bearded bin Laden in a scruffy room, wrapped in a blanket and wearing a ski cap while watching videotapes of himself.

"This compound in Abbottabad was an active command and control center for al Qaeda's top leader and it's clear ... that he was not just a strategic thinker for the group," the U.S. intelligence official said in Washington. "He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions."

DUELING NARRATIVES

The dueling narratives of bin Laden reflect Washington's and Islamabad's interests in peddling their own versions of bin Laden's hidden life behind the walls of his compound.

Stressing bin Laden's weakness makes his discovery just a few minutes' walk from a military academy less embarrassing for Pakistan, but playing up his importance makes the U.S. operation all the more victorious.

The competing claims came as senior Pakistani officials said bin Laden may have lived in Pakistan for more than seven years before he was shot dead.

One of bin Laden's widows, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, told investigators bin Laden and his family had spent five years in Abbottabad.

Abdulfattah, along with two other wives and several children, were among 15 or 16 people detained by Pakistani authorities at the compound after the raid.

She said that before Abbottabad, bin Laden had stayed in a nearby village for nearly 2-1/2 years.

 

(Additional reporting by Kamran Haider in Chak Shah Mohammad and Chris Allbritton in Islamabad; Steve Holland in Washington; Writing by John Chalmers; Editing by Sandra Maler)

    Bin Laden had support network in Pakistan: Obama, R, 8.7.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/08/us-binladen-idUSTRE7410D320110508

U.S. takes heat off Pakistan

on bin Laden's hideout

WASHINGTON/ISLAMABAD | Sun May 8, 2011
10:22am EDT
Reuters
By Donna Smith and Zeeshan Haider

WASHINGTON/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - The Obama administration took some heat off Pakistan on Sunday, saying it had no evidence that Islamabad knew Osama bin Laden was living in the country before he was killed by U.S. commandos in a garrison town a short drive from the capital.

Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani is scheduled to "take the nation into confidence" in parliament on Monday, his first statement to the people more than a week after the attack embarrassed the country and raised fears of a new rift between Islamabad and Washington.

Suspicion has deepened that Pakistan's pervasive Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, which has a long history of contacts with militant groups, may have had ties with the al Qaeda leader -- or that at least some of its agents did.

Pakistan has dismissed such suggestions and says it has paid the highest price in human life and money supporting the U.S. war on militancy launched after bin Laden's followers staged the September 11, 2001, attacks on America.

The U.S. national security adviser said that while bin Laden's residence for several years in a compound in Abbottabad, 50 km (30 miles) north of Islamabad, "needs to be investigated," there was nothing to suggest the government or security establishment knew he was there.

"I can tell you directly that I've not seen evidence that would tell us that the political, the military, or the intelligence leadership had foreknowledge of bin Laden," Tom Donilon told NBC's "Meet the Press" when asked if Pakistan was guilty of harboring the al Qaeda leader.

"How could this have happened in Pakistan?" Donilon said. "We need to investigate it. We need to work with the Pakistanis. And we're pressing the Pakistanis on this investigation."

 

DOUBTS ABOUT BIN LADEN'S INFLUENCE

Donilon said Pakistani officials also needed to provide U.S. authorities with intelligence they had gathered from the compound where bin Laden was killed, and access to three wives who are in Pakistani custody.

But he added that despite difficulties in the U.S.-Pakistani relationship, "We've also had to work very closely with Pakistan in our counter-terror efforts. More terrorists and extremists have been captured or killed in Pakistan than anyplace else."

Pakistani security officials reacted with skepticism to a U.S. assertion that bin Laden was actively engaged in directing his far-flung network from his compound in Abbottabad where he was killed on May 2.

Washington said on Saturday that, based on a trove of documents and computer equipment seized in the raid, bin Laden's hideout was an "active command and control center" for al Qaeda where he was involved in plotting future attacks on the United States.

"It sounds ridiculous," said a senior Pakistani intelligence official. "It doesn't sound like he was running a terror network."

Pakistani officials said the fact that there was no internet connection or even telephone line into the compound where the world's most-wanted man was hiding raised doubts about his centrality to al Qaeda.

Analysts have long maintained that, years before bin Laden's death, al Qaeda had fragmented into a decentralized group that operated tactically without him.

"It's bullshit," said a senior Pakistani security official, when quizzed on a U.S. intelligence official's assertion that bin Laden had been "active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions" of the Islamist militant group from his hideout.

On Saturday, the White House released five video clips of bin Laden taken from the compound, most of them showing the al Qaeda leader, his beard dyed black, evidently rehearsing the video-taped speeches he sometimes distributed to his followers.

None of the videos was released with sound. A U.S. intelligence official said it had been removed because the United States did not want to transmit bin Laden's propaganda. But he said they contained the usual criticism of the United States as well as capitalism.

While several video segments showed him rehearsing, one showed an aging and grey-bearded bin Laden in a scruffy room, wrapped in a blanket and wearing a ski cap while watching videotapes of himself.

"This compound in Abbottabad was an active command and control center for al Qaeda's top leader and it's clear ... that he was not just a strategic thinker for the group," the U.S. intelligence official said in Washington. "He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions."

 

DUELLING NARRATIVES

The duelling narratives of bin Laden reflect both Washington's and Islamabad's interests in peddling their own versions of bin Laden's hidden life behind the walls of his compound.

Stressing bin Laden's weakness makes his discovery just a few minutes' walk from a military academy less embarrassing for Pakistan, but playing up his importance makes the U.S. operation all the more victorious.

The competing claims came as senior Pakistani officials said bin Laden may have lived in Pakistan for more than seven years before he was shot dead.

One of bin Laden's widows, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, told investigators bin Laden and his family had spent five years in Abbottabad.

Abdulfattah, along with two other wives and several children, were among 15 or 16 people detained by Pakistani authorities at the compound after the raid.

She said that before Abbottabad, bin Laden had stayed in a nearby village for nearly two-and-a-half years.

Residents of the village of Chak Shah Mohammad, at the end of a bumpy road flanked by fields of wheat, were both puzzled and a little scared to find themselves at the focus of the investigation.

"Everyone in the village knows when a cow has a calf so how could bin Laden and his family hide here?" Mohammad Naseer, a 65-year-old retired soldier, said as he took a break from working his fields. "I can say for sure he wasn't here."

The village is made up of about 120 small, brick buildings, homes and sheds, and has a population of about 400 people, although many have left for work in cities.

Pakistani security agents have been going house to house, searching for clues.

"Police never used to come to our doors but now these guys are turning up all suspicious of us," said school teacher Ahmed Sultan.

"My young kids are asking 'Dad what happened, what did you do?'" he said. "We have nothing to do with bin Laden. We're Pakistani ... We don't feel anything for him."

 

(Additional reporting by Kamran Haider in Chak Shah Mohammad and Chris Allbritton in Islamabad; Writing by John Chalmers; Editing by Rob Birsel)

    U.S. takes heat off Pakistan on bin Laden's hideout, R, 8.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/08/us-binladen-idUSTRE7410D320110508

Killing Evil Doesn’t Make Us Evil

May 7, 2011
Reuters
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

I don’t want closure. There is no closure after tragedy.

I want memory, and justice, and revenge.

When you’re dealing with a mass murderer who bragged about incinerating thousands of Americans and planned to kill countless more, that seems like the only civilized and morally sound response.

We briefly celebrated one of the few clear-cut military victories we’ve had in a long time, a win that made us feel like Americans again — smart and strong and capable of finding our enemies and striking back at them without getting trapped in multitrillion-dollar Groundhog Day occupations.

But within days, Naval Seal-gazing shifted to navel-gazing.

There was the bad comedy of solipsistic Republicans with wounded egos trying to make it about how right they were and whinging that George W. Bush was due more credit. Their attempt to renew the debate about torture is itself torture.

W. preferred to sulk in his Dallas tent rather than join President Obama at ground zero in a duet that would have certainly united the country.

Whereas the intelligence work that led to the destruction of Bin Laden was begun in the Bush administration, the cache of schemes taken from Osama’s Pakistan house debunked the fanciful narrative that the Bush crew pushed: that Osama was stuck in a cave unable to communicate, increasingly irrelevant and a mere symbol, rather than operational. Osama, in fact, was at the helm, spending his days whipping up bloody schemes to kill more Americans.

In another inane debate last week, many voices suggested that decapitating the head of a deadly terrorist network was some sort of injustice.

Taking offense after Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said he was “much relieved” at the news of Bin Laden’s death, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, posted the Twitter message: “Ban Ki-moon wrong on Osama bin Laden: It’s not justice for him to be killed even if justified; no trial, conviction.”

I leave it to subtler minds to parse the distinction between what is just and what is justified.

When Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said she was “glad” Bin Laden had been killed, a colleague called such talk “medieval.”

Christophe Barbier, editor of the centrist French weekly L’Express, warned: “To cry one’s joy in the streets of our cities is to ape the turbaned barbarians who danced the night of Sept. 11.”

Those who celebrated on Sept. 11 were applauding the slaughter of American innocents. When college kids spontaneously streamed out Sunday night to the White House, ground zero and elsewhere, they were the opposite of bloodthirsty: they were happy that one of the most certifiably evil figures of our time was no more.

The confused image of Bin Laden as a victim was exacerbated by John Brennan, the Obama national security aide who intemperately presented an inaccurate portrait of what had happened on the third floor in Abbottabad.

Unlike the president and the Navy Seals, who performed with steely finesse, Brennan was overwrought, exaggerating the narrative to demonize the demon.

The White House had to backtrack from Brennan’s contentions that Osama was “hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield” and that he died after resisting in a firefight.

It may be that some administration officials have taken Dick Cheney’s belittling so much to heart that they are still reluctant to display effortless macho. Liberal guilt may have its uses, but it should not be wasted on this kill-mission.

The really insane assumption behind some of the second-guessing is that killing Osama somehow makes us like Osama, as if all killing is the same.

Only fools or knaves would argue that we could fight Al Qaeda’s violence non-violently.

President Obama was prepared to take a life not only to avenge American lives already taken but to deter the same killer from taking any more. Aside from Bin Laden’s plotting, his survival and his legend were inspirations for more murder.

If stealth bombers had dropped dozens of 2,000-pound bombs and wiped out everyone, no one would have been debating whether Osama was armed. The president chose the riskiest option presented to him, but one that spared nearly all the women and children at the compound, and anyone in the vicinity.

Unlike Osama, the Navy Seals took great care not to harm civilians — they shot Bin Laden’s youngest wife in the leg and carried two young girls out of harm’s way before killing Osama.

Morally and operationally, this was counterterrorism at its finest.

We have nothing to apologize for.

    Killing Evil Doesn’t Make Us Evil, R, 7.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/opinion/08dowd.html

Why We Celebrate a Killing

May 7, 2011
The New York Times
By JONATHAN HAIDT

Charlottesville, Va.

A  MAN is shot in the head, and joyous celebrations break out 7,000 miles away. Although Americans are in full agreement that the demise of Osama bin Laden is a good thing, many are disturbed by the revelry. We should seek justice, not vengeance, they urge. Doesn’t this lower us to “their” level? Didn’t the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. say, “I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy”? (No, he did not, but the Twitter users who popularized that misattributed quotation last week found it inspiring nonetheless.)

Why are so many Americans reluctant to join the party? As a social psychologist I believe that one major reason is that some people are thinking about this national event using the same moral intuitions they’d use for a standard criminal case. For example, they ask us to imagine whether it would be appropriate for two parents to celebrate the execution, by lethal injection, of the man who murdered their daughter.

Of course the parents would be entitled to feel relief and perhaps even private joy. But if they threw a party at the prison gates, popping Champagne corks as the syringe went in, that would be a celebration of death and vengeance, not justice. And is that not what we saw last Sunday night when young revelers, some drinking beer, converged on Times Square and the White House?

No, it is not. You can’t just scale up your ideas about morality at the individual level and apply them to groups and nations. If you do, you’ll miss all that was good, healthy and even altruistic about last week’s celebrations.

Here’s why. For the last 50 years, many evolutionary biologists have told us that we are little different from other primates — we’re selfish creatures, able to act altruistically only when it will benefit our kin or our future selves. But in the last few years there’s been a growing recognition that humans, far more than other primates, were shaped by natural selection acting at two different levels simultaneously. There’s the lower level at which individuals compete relentlessly with other individuals within their own groups. This competition rewards selfishness.

But there’s also a higher level at which groups compete with other groups. This competition favors groups that can best come together and act as one. Only a few species have found a way to do this. Bees, ants and termites are the best examples. Their brains and bodies are specialized for working as a team to accomplish nearly miraculous feats of cooperation like hive construction and group defense.

Early humans found ways to come together as well, but for us unity is a fragile and temporary state. We have all the old selfish programming of other primates, but we also have a more recent overlay that makes us able to become, briefly, hive creatures like bees. Just think of the long lines to give blood after 9/11. Most of us wanted to do something — anything — to help.

This two-layer psychology is the key to understanding religion, warfare, team sports and last week’s celebrations. The great sociologist Émile Durkheim even went so far as to call our species Homo duplex, or “two-level man.” Durkheim was writing a century ago, as organized religion was weakening across Europe. He wanted to know how nations and civil institutions could bind people into moral communities without the aid of religion. He thought the most powerful glue came from the emotions.

He contrasted two sets of “social sentiments,” one for each level. At the lower level, sentiments like respect and affection help individuals forge relationships with other individuals. But Durkheim was most interested in the sentiments that bind people into groups — the collective emotions. These emotions dissolve the petty, small-minded self. They make people feel that they are a part of something larger and more important than themselves.

One such emotion he called “collective effervescence”: the passion and ecstasy that is found in tribal religious rituals when communities come together to sing, dance around a fire and dissolve the boundaries that separate them from each other. The spontaneous celebrations of last week were straight out of Durkheim.

So is collective effervescence a good thing, or an ugly psychological relic from tribal times?

Some of those who were disturbed by the celebrations fear that this kind of unity is dangerous because it makes America more warlike and prejudiced against outsiders. When celebrants chanted “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” and sang “God Bless America,” were they not displaying a hateful “us versus them” mindset?

Once again, no. Many social psychologists distinguish patriotism — a love of one’s own country — from nationalism, which is the view that one’s own country is superior to other countries and should therefore be dominant. Nationalism is generally found to be correlated with racism and with hostility toward other countries, but patriotism by itself is not.

The psychologist Linda Skitka studied the psychological traits that predicted which people displayed American flags in the weeks after 9/11. She found that the urge to display the flag “reflected patriotism and a desire to show solidarity with fellow citizens, rather than a desire to express out-group hostility.”

This is why I believe that last week’s celebrations were good and healthy. America achieved its goal — bravely and decisively — after 10 painful years. People who love their country sought out one another to share collective effervescence. They stepped out of their petty and partisan selves and became, briefly, just Americans rejoicing together.

This hive-ish moment won’t last long. But in the communal joy of last week, many of us felt, for an instant, that Americans might still be capable of working together to meet threats and challenges far greater than Osama bin Laden.

 

Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is the author of the forthcoming book
“The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.”

    Why We Celebrate a Killing, NYT, 7.5.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/opinion/08haidt.html

Watery Grave, Murky Law

May 7, 2011
The New York Times
By LEOR HALEVI

Nashville

AFTER Osama bin Laden’s corpse was slipped into the North Arabian Sea, the White House’s chief counterterrorism adviser declared that the United States had buried him “in strict conformance with Islamic precepts and practices.” According to a senior military official, the body was washed, shrouded and dispatched with a funeral prayer.

Despite its best efforts, the United States government still has much to learn about the intricacies of Muslim funerary law. Its strictures are more nuanced, and perhaps also more flexible, than it imagined.

According to the Koran, the origins of burial stretch back to the dawn of humanity. Cain, full of remorse after killing his brother, was inspired by a ground-scratching raven to hide the naked corpse in the earth. Islamic law insists on this ritual as the ideal one.

But medieval jurists did recognize that travelers and merchants sometimes died at sea. Shafii, the founder of a Sunni school of law, recommended that ships either keep the body on board until they could reach land or sandwich it between two wooden slabs and tow it with a rope.

Other jurists prescribed different actions, depending on the circumstances. If the ship was far from shore and the body began to decompose, then it was permissible to deposit it in the sea, weighted with metal or stone so that it would sink to the bottom. Jurists hoped that sailors, while lowering the deceased, would turn his face toward Mecca. Releasing the corpse in a floating coffin was also an option, if there was a good chance that it would wash up on the shores of a Muslim country, where the body would receive last rites on land.

In general, however, Shariah permits burial at sea only in extraordinary circumstances. So some interpreters of Islamic law have rushed to denounce what was done with Bin Laden’s body. But the implication that Bin Laden deserved an ordinary Muslim burial doesn’t necessarily comply with that law. Islamic jurists have always made important exceptions to burial rites, depending on how the deceased lived and died.

Largely because of the exigencies of war, those who died on the battlefield were traditionally not entitled to standard rites. In accordance with Shariah, their corpses may be deposited in communal graves. There is no need for prayers, or for washing or shrouding their bodies; immediately upon death martyrs’ bodies are miraculously regenerated, and they receive silken robes in paradise.

Medieval jurists also made exceptions for highway robbers, violent rebels and unrepentant apostates, who were on occasion dismembered and decapitated, their remains left on display. Shafii argued that just rulers ought to treat the bodies of executed rebels respectfully and that they could administer last rites. But many jurists disagreed, arguing that they were undeserving of such honors.

These exceptions matter because Bin Laden’s religious status is a matter of contention among Muslims. On one end of the spectrum are Muslims who consider him an outsider to Islam: if not quite an apostate, a terrorist whose right to an official Muslim prayer is debatable at best. (In 2005 the Islamic Commission of Spain essentially excommunicated Bin Laden, arguing that he should not be treated as a Muslim.) They must find it as perplexing as I do that the United States government granted the man it identified not as a Muslim, but as a “mass murderer of Muslims,” the dubious honor of a quasi-Islamic funeral.

On the other end are Muslims who believe that Bin Laden is now enjoying the blessings of martyrdom. From a theological perspective, it matters little to them how Americans on the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson disposed of the corpse.

Which is all to say that Bin Laden’s burial was doctrinally irrelevant to some Muslims, and confusing to others. Most of the rest feel uneasy. Perhaps the United States could not have avoided that. But a deeper understanding of the history of Islam’s sacred law could have prevented us from seeming so at sea.
 

Leor Halevi, an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University,
is the author of “Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society.”

    Watery Grave, Murky Law, NYT, 7.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/opinion/08halevi.html

Bin Laden Was Dead Already

May 7, 2011
The New York Times
By GILLES KEPEL

Paris

HAD Osama bin Laden been killed during the presidency of George W. Bush, he might have become an iconic martyr for anti-Western movements throughout the Muslim world. Those days are gone. Jihadist Web sites mourn their slain mentor, but few in the Arab street care for a man who brought nothing to the region but havoc and desolation, provoked the United States into waging war and, above all, reinforced the very rulers whom radical Islamists most wished to topple.

Arab despots initially saw their life expectancies extended after 9/11: better Ben Ali, the thinking went, than Bin Laden. Now the dictators — Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt — are being thrown out, while their counterparts in Libya and Saudi Arabia cling to power by playing the old trump card of Arab oil. From Libya to Bahrain, Syria to Yemen, a pluralistic political system is the goal of a young, urban middle class that is sick of the old order.

In the end, Bin Laden did not deliver. He trapped the United States into invading and occupying Iraq only to see it become a playground for the Shiite leaders of Iran, much to the chagrin of both neo-conservatives in Washington and the Sunni radicals who make up Al Qaeda. He had nothing to offer beyond hatred for the West.

The waning relevance of Al Qaeda and authoritarian legitimacy opened a political space for the Jasmine Revolution in Tunis and the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt. Islamists and their sympathizers have been involved in the antigovernment movements. Some might once have been lured by Qaeda mythology, but most seek to blend democracy and pluralism with the tenets of Islamic civilization. The Turkish example of a secular state with an Islamic flavor is debated far more in the Arab media than Al Qaeda’s jihadist vision.

The most charismatic of global terrorists is now gone: does that mean that his network will collapse in despair, or are we to expect more violence by his orphans? In April, Ayman al-Zawahri, the Egyptian-born doctor who was Al Qaeda’s second in command, posted an hourlong video from his hideout in Pakistan singing the praises of Abboud al-Zomor, the former intelligence officer who supplied the bullets that killed President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt in 1981. Mr. al-Zomor, who was released from prison after Mr. Mubarak’s downfall, has been trying to mobilize an Islamist party that would adopt Shariah law.

But Mr. al-Zawahri’s desperate effort to jump on the bandwagon of the Egyptian revolution has had little resonance. More troubling are the continued efforts of Qaeda splinter groups in North Africa and on the Arabian Peninsula. Any future acts of terrorism, however, are unlikely to have a snowball effect. Terrorism has its own political economy: when repeated too often, to no avail, its operations lose impact and eventually backfire.

Bin Laden’s heirs can still spread havoc, but they have lost the political momentum. Within the field of Islamist militancy, the axis of the battle runs now between Salafists who adhere to a strict, literal version of Shariah and the scattered Muslim Brotherhood, torn between a young generation that finds much in common with its secular contemporaries and the “old turbans” who still run the show. Another fault line divides those Islamists who wish to be a part of pluralistic political life, and those who see elections as a chance to seize power and not give it back.

The White House has rightly been keen to avoid any Hollywood-style display of triumph. President Obama is eager to avoid a backlash and to capitalize on an event that is in tune with present-day Arab history. The raid that killed Bin Laden has set back American-Pakistani relations, though Pakistani intelligence has lost a big bargaining chip and will probably emerge weakened. As for Afghanistan, a Saudi royal is said to have counseled the United States, “Just kill Bin Laden and leave.” It may be time to take his advice seriously.

The challenge is to take advantage of Bin Laden’s death and push to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians — a cloud over the prospects for Arab democracy.

Mr. Obama might well have a unique opportunity, as President George H. W. Bush had after the Persian Gulf war in 1991, when he twisted the arms of Yitzhak Shamir and Yasir Arafat into sending their representatives to a peace conference in Madrid.

The political capital earned from Bin Laden’s death will not last forever — it has to be invested soon. After all, the tragic history of the Middle East is one of opportunities not taken.

Gilles Kepel, a professor of Middle East studies at the Institute of Political Studies
in Paris, is the co-editor of “Al Qaeda in Its Own Words.”

    Bin Laden Was Dead Already, NYT, 7.5.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/opinion/08kepel.html

Bin Laden’s Secret Life

in a Diminished, Dark World

May 7, 2011
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER,

CARLOTTA GALL and SALMAN MASOOD

This article is by Elisabeth Bumiller, Carlotta Gall and Salman Masood.

WASHINGTON — The world’s most wanted terrorist lived his last five years imprisoned behind the barbed wire and high walls of his home in Abbottabad, Pakistan, his days consumed by dark arts and domesticity.

American officials believe that Osama bin Laden spent many hours on the computer, relying on couriers to bring him thumb drives packed with information from the outside world.

Videos seized from Bin Laden’s compound and released by the Obama administration on Saturday showed him wrapped in an old blanket watching himself on TV, like an aging actor imagining a comeback. A senior intelligence official said other videos showed him practicing and flubbing his lines in front of a camera. He was interested enough in his image, the official said, to dye his white beard black for the recordings.

His once-large entourage of Arab bodyguards was down to one trusted Pakistani courier and the courier’s brother, who also had the job of buying goats, sheep and Coca-Cola for the household. While his physical world had shrunk to two indoor rooms and daily pacing in his courtyard, Bin Laden was still revered at home — by his three wives, by his children and by the tight, interconnected circle of loyalists in the compound.

He did not do chores or tend to the cows and water buffalo on the south side of the compound like the other men. The household, American officials figure, knew how important it was for him to devote his time to Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization he founded and was still actively running at the time of his death.

American officials say there is much they do not know about the last years of Bin Laden, who was shot dead by Navy Seal commandos last Monday in his third-floor bedroom, and the peculiar life of the compound. But what has emerged so far, in interviews with United States and Pakistani military and intelligence officials and Bin Laden’s neighbors in the middle-class hamlet where he had been hiding, is a portrait of an isolated man, perhaps a little bored, presiding over family life while plotting mayhem — still desperate to be heard, intent on outsize influence, musing in his handwritten notebooks about killing more Americans.

“My father would not look forward to staying indoors month after month, because he is a man who loves everything about nature,” Omar bin Laden, a son of Bin Laden, said in an e-mail message in 2009. “But if I were to say what he would need to survive, I would say food and water. He would go inward and occupy himself with his mind.”

Abbottabad, a scenic hill cantonment for the British Raj and later home to the elite military academy that is Pakistan’s West Point, became the Bin Laden family base in late 2005. Their large compound, in a new neighborhood on the outskirts of town, is now the most photographed house in the country, with stories spilling forth from astonished neighbors. Bin Laden, who was the tall man C.I.A. officers watched pacing the courtyard from a surveillance post nearby, never went out. The neighbors knew the family as Arshad Khan and Tariq Khan, the aliases of the trusted courier and his brother. The courier also went by the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.

The Khans seemed pleasant enough, but they kept to themselves behind their 12-foot concrete walls and barbed wire, neighbors said. They never invited anyone in or went to others’ homes, although they did go to prayers in the mosque and funerals in the neighborhood. The women left the compound only with their husbands in a car, and covered in black burqas. The children rarely played outside. When neighborhood boys playing in the fields let a ball fly into the compound by mistake, the Khans gave them 50 rupees, less than a dollar, to buy a new one rather than let them in to retrieve it.

“We thought maybe they had killed someone back in their village or something like that and were therefore very cautious,” said a neighbor, an engineer who identified himself as Zaheer.

The brothers, both in their 30s, had two cars, a red Suzuki van and a white Suzuki jeep, and paid double the daily wage (about $2.40) to laborers who worked on the house as it was being built in 2004. They offered various explanations to the neighbors about their comparative wealth, once saying they had a hotel in Dubai or that they worked in the money-changing business. They were Pashtuns from Charsadda, in Pakistan’s northwest frontier.

“They never told us why they came here,” said Naheed Abassi, 21, a driver and farm laborer who said he had worked on construction of the house. The courier and his brother, both killed in the raid, were sons of a man Bin Laden had known for decades. A Bin Laden son, Khalid, who lived in the home and was also killed, was married to a sister of the Khans, Pakistani officials said.

Little is known about how Bin Laden, believed to be 54, managed his relationships with his three wives. (Islam traditionally allows a man to have four wives.) On the night he was killed, Bin Laden was in his bedroom with his youngest wife, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, whose Yemeni passport shows her to be 29, a quarter-century Bin Laden’s junior.

This wife was apparently the one shot by commandos in the leg as she rushed them in an effort to protect her husband. American officials said there were also children in the bedroom; Pakistani intelligence officers, in reports that have not been verified by American officials, said a 12-year-old girl told them that she was a daughter of Bin Laden and that she saw the Americans shoot him. There was one woman killed in the raid, caught in cross-fire when the commandos killed the courier. A retired Pakistani intelligence officer, Brig. Asa Munir, said the woman was an Arab doctor.

There were nine children in the household, but it remained unclear how many belonged to Bin Laden and his son and how many to the courier and his brother. Neighbors say the courier and his brother had seven children between them, and so there was no great surprise when Pakistanis found remedies for children’s ear infections, colds and coughs. According to NBC News, the Pakistanis also found Avena syrup, an extract of wild oats that can be taken for an upset stomach but is also sold as an aphrodisiac.

Contrary to a widely held belief that Bin Laden was on dialysis to treat a kidney ailment, Pakistani investigators said last week that his youngest wife told them he was healthy. “He was neither weak nor frail,” one of the investigator quoted the wife as saying. She told them, they said, that Bin Laden had recovered from two kidney operations a decade or more ago in southern Afghanistan, in part by using homemade remedies, including watermelon.

Although American intelligence analysts are just beginning to pore over a huge trove of computer files, storage devices and cellphones that the commandos recovered from the compound, they were eager to release the new videos, five in all, on Saturday. They said they did not know when the video of Bin Laden watching himself on television had been recorded, but since there is a brief image of President Obama flickering on the screen, it appears to have been made in the compound sometime after January 2009, when Mr. Obama was inaugurated.

Another of the videos, all of which were provided without sound, showed what an intelligence official said was Bin Laden speaking in a “message to the American people” that condemned the United States and capitalism. The official said the video had been recorded between Oct. 9 and Nov. 5, 2010.

American officials assume that during the last five years, Bin Laden recorded about a half-dozen audio messages a year from inside the house. The messages were meant for dissemination to the outside world, but to avoid detection, Bin Laden had no Internet, e-mail or phone lines that he could use to send them.

Instead, the audio files were evidently stored on a CD or tiny thumb drive and passed from courier to courier until they reached As Sahab, Al Qaeda’s media arm. There they would usually be combined with still images of Bin Laden, subtitled translations, quotations from the Koran and other embellishments. The finished product would be uploaded to jihadist Web forums and occasionally delivered to Al Jazeera or other broadcasters.

The messages, the only glimpse the world had of Bin Laden’s thinking while he lived inside the compound, suggest not just a firebrand calling for mass murder — a staple of most of the recordings — but a man, perhaps stifled by monotony, attuned to the news and sometimes attracted to unexpected subjects. It is not known if he had a radio in the house, but his son Omar, who lived with him in Afghanistan until 1999, described his father as constantly listening to the BBC.

In October, when American intelligence was close on the trail of the courier and spy satellites were taking detailed photographs of the house, Bin Laden issued two audio statements urging help for victims of floods in Pakistan. “We are in need of a big change in the method of relief work because the number of victims is great due to climate changes in modern times,” he said.

In 2007, he complained that Democratic control of Congress had not ended the war in Iraq, a fact he attributed to the pernicious influence of “big corporations.” In other messages he commented on the writings of Noam Chomsky, the leftist professor at M.I.T., and praised former President Jimmy Carter’s book supporting Palestinian rights.

Although the couriers who handed off the thumb drives were outside electronic detection, that did not extend to Al Qaeda’s No. 3, who needed a cellphone and e-mail to carry out plans and give orders to more than one person. As a result, Al Qaeda’s third-in-commands had short life expectancies, the fodder of wry jokes in the counterterrorism field. Two No. 3s were killed around the time Bin Laden lived in the compound — Hamza Rabia in December 2005 and Mustafa Abu al-Yazid in 2010.

Congressional officials said they were struck by how Bin Laden’s low-profile, low-tech lifestyle protected him but might have also hastened his death. Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who serves on the Armed Services Committee, said that the lack of a large entourage was obviously intended to attract as little attention as possible.

“If you had 25 18-year-olds with guns, then not only would the C.I.A. notice, but so would the Pakistani military,” Mr. Reed said.

But he said he was also struck that Bin Laden was not prepared for the kind of attack the commandos carried out. “There was no escape route, no tunnels, not even false rooms in the house in which to hide,” he said. “It makes you wonder: at what point did that extra degree of vigilance he had get dulled by routine?”

 

Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Washington, and Carlotta Gall and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan. Reporting was contributed by Scott Shane, Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt from Washington, David Rohde from New York, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan.

    Bin Laden’s Secret Life in a Diminished, Dark World, R, 7.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/world/asia/08binladen.html

Videos From Bin Laden’s

Hide-Out Released

May 7, 2011
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Saturday released five videos recovered from Osama bin Laden‘s hide-out in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that an intelligence official said showed the Qaeda founder threatening the United States, condemning capitalism and at some points flubbing his lines and missing a cue. In the most candid scenes, Bin Laden can be seen watching news coverage of himself on television.

The videos, which were made public without sound to avoid disseminating terrorist messages, were the first materials to be released from what an American intelligence official described as the “single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever.” The trove, which includes hundreds of computer file storage devices, hard drives, videos, documents and personal papers, was seized by the United States assault team that killed Bin Laden early last Monday.

The administration released the videos in part to promote an intelligence triumph but also to try to further diminish the legacy and appeal of Bin Laden. The intelligence official who briefed reporters at an unusual Pentagon news conference on Saturday took pains to point out that Bin Laden, who was 54 when he was killed, had dyed his white beard black for his appearances in the videos — suggesting vanity or at least a desire to appear younger in videos made for distribution to his followers around the world.

“He took very seriously and engaged heavily in Al Qaeda propaganda operations,” said the official, who asked not to be named because of ground rules imposed by the administration. “Our takeaway is that he jealously guarded his own image.”

The official said the administration released the videos without sound to avoid the untenable scenario of the Obama administration effectively broadcasting a Bin Laden message of terrorism and anti-Americanism after his death. But the lack of sound prevented an independent assessment of Bin Laden’s actual words, phrasing and tone.

The most revealing video shows Bin Laden sitting on the floor of a small room, wrapped in a blanket as he watched news clips about himself on television. In the video, which shows an old television set with a tangle of power cords running into a control box, Bin Laden appeared to be flipping through channels on the menu screen of a satellite TV service. A rendering of Bin Laden’s compound released by the administration last week showed at least one satellite dish on top of a building within its walls.

The intelligence official said analysts had not yet determined when or where the video of Bin Laden watching himself on television was recorded. But since one of the images flickering on Bin Laden’s screen was of President Obama, the video appeared to date from sometime after January 2009, when Mr. Obama was inaugurated. The video was likely recorded in Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, where he lived from 2005 until his death.

Two of the videos consisted of outtakes from Bin Laden’s recorded messages to his followers — one in which the intelligence official said Bin Laden was misspeaking and having to start over and another in which he was said to miss a cue. The official said that in those videos, Bin Laden’s beard had been dyed black to make him appear younger. The video of him watching television, however, shows him with a mostly white beard.

The official said that Bin Laden’s concern about his appearance suggested that he was intensely interested in the image he presented to his supporters, and that he was deeply immersed in the propaganda efforts of Al Qaeda. That view contrasts sharply with earlier theories that he had become a marginal character who served as a figurehead for the terrorist group.

Echoing assessments by the Central Intelligence Agency last week, the official described the Bin Laden compound as a “command and control center” for Al Qaeda, where Bin Laden not only plotted attacks but was also deeply involved in directing the operations of Qaeda lieutenants. Those assessments differ sharply from previous views of intelligence officials, who had come to believe that Bin Laden was more of a figurehead.

    Videos From Bin Laden’s Hide-Out Released, NYT, 7.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/world/asia/08intel.html

Bin Laden directed Qaeda

from Pakistan compound

WASHINGTON | Sat May 7, 2011
7:39pm EDT
Reuters
By David Alexander

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden was actively engaged in directing his far-flung network in plots against the United States from the compound in Pakistan where he was killed, a senior U.S. intelligence official said as new video images of the al Qaeda leader were released on Saturday.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said information carted away from the compound by U.S. forces after Monday's raid, represented the largest trove of intelligence ever obtained from a single terrorism suspect.

"This compound in Abbottabad was an active command and control center for al Qaeda's top leader and it's clear ... that he was not just a strategic thinker for the group," the official said. "He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions."

President Barack Obama's administration released five video clips of bin Laden taken from the compound, most of them showing the al Qaeda leader, his beard dyed black, evidently rehearsing the videotaped speeches he sometimes distributed to his followers.

None of the videos was released with sound. The intelligence official said it had been removed because the United States did not want to transmit bin Laden's propaganda. But he said they contained the usual criticism of the United States as well as capitalism.

While several video segments showed him rehearsing, one showed an aging and gray-bearded bin Laden in an austere setting, wrapped in a blanket and wearing a ski cap while watching videotapes of himself.

The official said the personal nature of the videos was further evidence that the man killed in the raid was bin Laden, who carefully managed his public image.

The revelations came as senior Pakistani officials said bin Laden may have lived in Pakistan for more than seven years before he was shot dead by U.S. Navy SEALS, a disclosure that could further strain relations between the two countries.

One of bin Laden's widows told Pakistani investigators that he stayed in a village for nearly two and a half years before moving to the nearby garrison town of Abbottabad, close to the capital of Islamabad, where he was killed.

The wife, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, said bin Laden and his family had spent five years in Abbottabad, where one of the most elaborate manhunts in history ended on Monday.

"Amal (bin Laden's wife) told investigators that they lived in a village in Haripur district for nearly two and a half years before moving to Abbottabad at the end of 2005," one of the security officials told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Abdulfattah, along with two other wives and several children, were among 15 or 16 people detained by Pakistani authorities at the compound after the raid.

The senior U.S. intelligence official said bin Laden's identity had been confirmed after his death in several ways -- by a woman at the compound, by facial recognition methods and by matching against a DNA profile with a likelihood of error of only 1 in 11.8 quadrillion.

An initial review of the information taken from the compound showed bin Laden continued to be interested in attacking the United States and "appeared to show continuing interest in transportation and infrastructure targets," the official said.

NOT "A FIGUREHEAD"

"The materials reviewed over the past several days clearly show that bin Laden remained an active leader in al Qaeda, providing strategic, operational and tactical instructions to the group," the official said. "He was far from a figurehead. He was an active player, making the recent operation even more essential for our nation's security."

Pakistan, heavily dependent on billions of dollars in U.S. aid, is under intense pressure to explain how bin Laden could have spent so many years undetected just a few hours drive from its intelligence headquarters in the capital.

Suspicions have deepened that Pakistan's pervasive Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, which has a long history of contacts with militant groups, may have had ties with bin Laden -- or that at least some of its agents did. The agency has been described as a state within a state.

Pakistan has dismissed such suggestions and says it has paid the highest price in human life and money supporting the U.S. war on militancy launched after bin Laden's followers staged the September 11, 2001, attacks on America.

Security officials said Pakistan had launched an investigation into bin Laden's presence in the South Asian country seen as critical to stabilizing neighboring Afghanistan.

"It is very serious that bin Laden lived in cities (in Pakistan) ... and we couldn't nail it down fully," said one of the Pakistani officials.

The U.S. intelligence official said Washington assumed Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, was likely to assume control of the organization following bin Laden's death, but that was uncertain because he was disliked in some quarters.

"To some members of al Qaeda he's extremely controlling, is a micromanager and is not especially charismatic," the official said.

 

(Additional reporting by Kamran Haider in Chak Shah Mohammad, Pakistan;
editing by Christopher Wilson)

    Bin Laden directed Qaeda from Pakistan compound, R, 7.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/07/us-obama-statement-idUSTRE74107920110507

Obama pays tribute

to unit in bin Laden raid

FORT CAMPBELL, Kentucky | Fri May 6, 2011
3:57pm EDT
Reuters
By Matt Spetalnick

FORT CAMPBELL, Kentucky (Reuters) - President Barack Obama, basking in U.S. public approval for the killing of Osama bin Laden, flew to a military base on Friday to thank special forces involved in the deadly raid deep inside Pakistan.

With his job approval ratings up and even Republican critics congratulating him for the bin Laden operation, Obama paid tribute to the elite military team in a secrecy-shrouded meeting at Fort Campbell five days after announcing the al Qaeda leader was dead.

Obama was met on the tarmac by a delegation of military brass that included Vice Admiral William McRaven, the special operations chief reported to have had overall command of the Navy SEAL commandos who killed bin Laden on Monday.

Obama's visit, just a day after attending a somber wreath-laying ceremony at Ground Zero of the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York, came as questions grew about initial U.S. accounts of the airborne assault on the compound where bin Laden had been hiding.

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 -- has drawn criticism in the Muslim world and Europe, where some warn of a backlash against the West.

But most Americans regard the secretive special operations unit that killed bin Laden -- the mastermind of the 2001 hijack-plane attacks on the United States -- as national heroes, and Obama came to thank some of them personally.

At Fort Campbell, Obama was also set to address troops just returned from tours in Afghanistan and ready to celebrate the outcome of the bin Laden mission with their commander in chief. Soldiers gathered in a giant aircraft hangar festooned with American flags and a band belting out rock 'n' roll tunes. A giant "Job well done!" banner hung from the wall.

The strike team for the bin Laden operation included SEAL commandos who underwent weeks of intensive training for the nighttime assault on bin Laden's high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The sprawling Kentucky base is home to the U.S. Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, a unit nicknamed the "Night Stalkers" and whose helicopter pilots were reported to have flown the mission.

Obama's meeting with special forces operatives was held privately to protect the secretive nature of their work.

White House spokesman Jay Carney would only say Obama was meeting "some special operators" involved in the raid. Secrecy was so tight that journalists traveling with Obama were removed from his motorcade and not even allowed to see the exterior of the special operations center where the meeting took place.

 

POLITICAL DIVIDENDS

Obama is already reaping dividends from bin Laden's death, with most recent polls showing his job approval rating jumping above 50 percent since the raid.

But the boost could be short-lived as voters focus again on the struggling economy, lingering unemployment and high gasoline prices -- top public concerns considered crucial to Obama's re-election chances next year.

Despite that, the killing of bin Laden will make it easier for Obama to fend off any criticism he is weak on national security, charges that Republicans have deployed effectively against Democrats for decades.

Although Obama has cautioned against triumphalism over bin Laden's death, even his political opponents seem willing to let him savor it.

Besides his late-night appearance to announce bin Laden's death, Obama used a Medal of Honor ceremony for heroes of the Korean War to lavish praise on those who carried out the Pakistan mission. He also gave a lengthy interview to CBS's "60 Minutes" program to air on Sunday.

Carney insisted Obama was not "gloating" about bin Laden's demise and was mindful the war against al Qaeda was far from over.

Al Qaeda confirmed on Friday that bin Laden was dead and vowed to mount more attacks on the West.

Obama's visit was also a chance to try to rally support for war effort in Afghanistan while reassuring Americans about his commitment to his long-standing pledge to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan in July.

With the demise of the man who came to symbolize Islamist militancy, Obama is already facing pressure from some lawmakers to speed up the U.S. exit from an unpopular war 10 years after Washington helped topple Afghanistan's Taliban for sheltering bin Laden and al Qaeda after the September 11 attacks.

But U.S. officials have insisted that while seriously weakened by the loss of bin Laden, al Qaeda remains a dangerous force and it is time to step up efforts to crush it.

 

(Reporting by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Peter Cooney)

    Obama pays tribute to unit in bin Laden raid, R, 6.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/06/us-binladen-obama-idUSTRE7455FG20110506

U.S. drones kill 17 in NW Pakistan;

protests over bin Laden

ISLAMABAD | Fri May 6, 2011
1:49pm EDT
Reuters
By Augustine Anthony

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - U.S. drone aircraft fired missiles into a house in Pakistan's North Waziristan region on Friday, killing at least 17 suspected militants as Islamists protested against the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Four drones took part in the first such attack since U.S. special forces killed the al Qaeda leader on Monday not far from Islamabad, further straining ties between the strategic allies whose cooperation is needed to stabilize neighboring Afghanistan.

Facing relentless suicide bombings by Islamic militants and struggling with a stagnant economy, Pakistan's leaders now face criticism from all sides on bin Laden.

Both Islamists and ordinary Pakistanis are questioning how their leaders can just stand by while the United States sends commandos deep inside the country into a garrison city to eliminate the al Qaeda chief.

At the same time, suspicions that some Pakistani security forces might have known he was hiding in the country threaten to strain already uneasy ties with Washington.

"The country's political and military leadership should immediately resign as they have failed to ensure the country's integrity," said Fareed Ahmed Paracha, a senior leader of the biggest Islamist political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, at a rally in the eastern city of Lahore.

"This is an attack on Pakistan's sovereignty," said Paracha of the raid by Navy SEALS that ended one of the most extensive manhunts in history.

Pre-dominantly Muslim Pakistan has yet to see any major backlash since bin Laden's killing, but is death has angered Islamists.

About 1,500 Islamists demonstrated near the city of Quetta, capital of Baluchistan province in the southwest, saying more figures like bin Laden would arise to wage holy war against the United States.

"Jihad (holy war) against America will not stop with the death of Osama," Fazal Mohammad Baraich, a cleric, said amid shouts of "Down with America."

"Osama bin Laden is a shaheed (martyr). The blood of Osama will give birth to thousands of other Osamas."

In Abbottabad, where the U.S. operation took place, dozens of Islamists marched through streets calling on the United States to stay out of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"America is the world's biggest terrorist," read one placard.

Small protests were also held in the cities of Multan, Hyderabad and Abbottabad.

Anti-American sentiment runs high here, despite billions of dollars in U.S. aid for nuclear-armed, Pakistan.

Pakistan's religious parties have not traditionally done well at the ballot box, but they wield considerable influence on the streets of a country where Islam is becoming more radicalized.

The U.S. war on militancy is unpopular in Pakistan because of the perception of high civilian deaths from drone attacks against suspected militants along the Afghan border and the feeling they are a violation of the country's sovereignty.

The Pakistani government said bin Laden's death was a milestone in the fight against militancy although it objected to the raid as a violation of sovereignty.

Pakistan has denied any knowledge of his whereabouts and the army threatened on Thursday to cut intelligence and military cooperation with the United States if it mounted more attacks.

Some Pakistanis are too overwhelmed by the daily grind in a politically and economically unstable nation that offers poor government services and education, to react to the fact that the world's most wanted man was living here for years undetected.

"This is just another instance of us becoming insensitive to all the chaos around us as a nation, and Osama's death is just another day, another incident for us," said Jibran Jawaid, a film producer in Pakistan's biggest city, Karachi.

"Frankly, when people are so worried about high food prices, no power, security and everything, they cannot be blamed for being insensitive. A roti (bread) costs so much, bombs go off every now and then, people are robbed daily, so should they worry about that or the U.S. raid?"

 

(Reporting by Gul Yousafzai in Quetta, Haji Mujtaba in North Waziristan, Kamran Haider in Abbottabad and Faisal Aziz in Karachi; Writing by Augustine Anthony; Editing by Michael Georgy)

    U.S. drones kill 17 in NW Pakistan; protests over bin Laden, R, 6.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/06/us-binladen-pakistan-protest-idUSTRE7453UQ20110506

U.N. rights investigators

seek facts on bin Laden death

GENEVA | Fri May 6, 2011
12:05pm EDT
Reuters
By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) - U.N. human rights investigators called on the United States on Friday to disclose whether there had been any plan to capture Osama bin Laden and if he was offered any "meaningful prospect of surrender and arrest."

Principles of engagement in such operations require the possibility of surrender, firing warning shots and if necessary wounding a suspect, rather than killing him, they said.

Failure to comply could amount to a "cold-blooded execution" but the overall situation must be taken into account, including whether U.S. forces were under attack, said Martin Scheinin, U.N. special rapporteur on protecting human rights while countering terrorism.

"We are just saying the U.S. government should answer questions concerning whether a meaningful prospect of surrender and arrest was given by the U.S., but perhaps not taken by Osama bin Laden," Scheinin told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Pakistani security officials have charged that U.S. troops, after landing by helicopter at the Abbottabad compound, shot the unarmed al Qaeda leader in cold blood rather than in a firefight, as U.S. officials first suggested.

It remained unclear whether the possibility of bin Laden's surrender had been built into the U.S. assault on the al Qaeda leader's hideout in Pakistan on Monday, according to Scheinin.

"You design an operation so that there is a meaningful possibility of surrender and arrest even if you think the offer will be refused and you have to resort to lethal force," he said.

"It is the overall situation that governs when resorting to lethal force is permissible," Scheinin said.

DEADLY FORCE

Earlier, Scheinin and Christof Heyns, U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said that in certain exceptional cases, deadly force may be used in "operations against terrorists."

"However, the norm should be that terrorists be dealt with as criminals, through legal processes of arrest, trial and judicially-decided punishment," the independent experts said in a joint statement.

"In respect of the recent use of deadly force against Osama bin Laden, the United States of America should disclose the supporting facts to allow an assessment in terms of international human rights law standards," they said.

"It will be particularly important to know if the planning of the mission allowed an effort to capture bin Laden."

Scheinin, a Finnish law professor who teaches in Florence, and Heyns, a South African human rights law professor, report to the U.N. Human Rights Council whose 47 members include the United States.

A U.S. acknowledgment that bin Laden was unarmed when shot in the head in its operation at his hideout in Pakistan on Monday -- as well as the sea burial of his body, a rare practice in Islam -- have drawn some criticism in the Arab world and Europe, where some have warned of a backlash.

Al Qaeda confirmed bin Laden was dead on Friday, dispelling some of the fog around the killing of the "holy warrior," and vowed to mount more attacks on the West.

Navi Pillay, the top U.N. human rights official, also called this week for light to be shed on the killing, stressing that all counter-terrorism operations must respect international law.

"We've raised a question mark about what happened precisely, more details are needed at this point," her spokesman Rupert Colville told a briefing in Geneva on Friday.

 

(Editing by Andrew Roche)

    U.N. rights investigators seek facts on bin Laden death, R, 6.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/06/us-binladen-un-experts-idUSTRE74545Q20110506

Timeline:

Osama bin Laden,

his life and death

Fri May 6, 2011
11:38am EDT
Reuters

(Reuters) - Here is a list of milestones in the life of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was killed in Pakistan this week:

1957 - Osama bin Mohammad bin Awad bin Laden was born in Riyadh, one of more than 50 children of a millionaire businessman. There are conflicting accounts of his precise date of birth.

1976-79 - Bin Laden studies management and economics at university in Jeddah.

December 26, 1979 - Soviet Union invades Afghanistan.

1984 - Bin Laden becomes involved with organization based in Peshawar, Pakistan, supporting Arab volunteers arriving to fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

1986 - Bin Laden moves to Peshawar, begins importing arms and forms his own small brigade of volunteer fighters.

1988 - Soviet forces leave Afghanistan.

- Al Qaeda (The Base) is established as a magnet for radical Muslims seeking a more fundamentalist brand of government in their home countries and joined in common hatred of the United States, Israel and U.S.-allied Muslim governments.

1991 - Bin Laden returns to Saudi Arabia, then leaves for exile in Sudan, having opposed the kingdom's alliance with the United States against Iraq.

June 1993 - Bin Laden family moves to expel Osama as shareholder in its businesses, which focuses on construction.

April 9, 1994 - Saudi Arabia, angered by bin Laden's propaganda against its rulers, revokes his citizenship.

May 1996 - Bin Laden is forced to leave Sudan after U.S. pressure on its government, and goes to Afghanistan.

August 1996 - Bin Laden issues a fatwa, or religious decree, that U.S. military personnel should be killed.

September 1996 - Taliban movement establishes "Islamic emirate" in Afghanistan.

October 1996 - U.S. names bin Laden as prime suspect in two bombings in Saudi Arabia that killed 24 U.S. servicemen and two Indians.

August 7, 1998 - Truck bombs explode at U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, killing 224, including 12 Americans.

August 20, 1998 - President Bill Clinton names bin Laden as America's top enemy and accuses him of responsibility for the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam bombings. U.S. launches missile strikes against what Clinton calls terrorist bases in Afghanistan and Sudan. One destroys a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, whose owner denies any affiliation with bin Laden.

October 12, 2000 - Al Qaeda strikes at destroyer USS Cole, in Yemeni port of Aden. Seventeen sailors are killed.

September 11, 2001 - Three hijacked planes crash into major U.S. landmarks, destroying New York's World Trade Center and plunging into the Pentagon. A fourth hijacked plane crashes in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people are killed. In a video released later, bin Laden says the collapse of the towers exceeded al Qaeda's expectations.

September 17, 2001 - U.S. President George W. Bush says bin Laden is "Wanted: Dead or Alive."

October 7, 2001 - United States attacks Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, host to bin Laden and al Qaeda.

November 2001 - Afghanistan's Taliban rulers are ousted.

December 6, 2001 - Anti-Taliban forces capture bin Laden's main base in Tora Bora mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Bin Laden evades capture.

September 10, 2002 - Al Jazeera broadcasts what it says is the voice of bin Laden praising the 9/11 hijackers as men who "changed the course of history."

November 2002 - Al Qaeda claims responsibility for suicide car bombs in Kenya that blew up the Mombasa Paradise resort hotel, popular with Israelis, killing 15 people and wounding 80.

October 2004 - Bin Laden bursts into U.S. election campaign in his first videotaped message in over a year to deride Bush.

September 2006 - Bush vows: "America will find you."

September 2007 - Bin Laden issues first new video for nearly three years, telling U.S. it is vulnerable despite its power.

May 18, 2008 - Bin Laden urges Muslims to break the Israeli-led blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and fight Arab governments that deal with Israel.

January 24, 2010 - Bin Laden claims responsibility for the failed December 25 bombing of a U.S.-bound plane in an audio tape and vows to continue attacks on the United States.

March 25, 2010 - Bin Laden says al Qaeda will kill any Americans it takes prisoner if accused September 11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, held by United States, is executed, according to an audiotape aired on al Jazeera.

January 21, 2011 - Bin Laden says in an audio recording that the release of French hostages held in Niger by al Qaeda depends on France's soldiers leaving Muslim lands.

May 2, 2011 - Bin Laden is killed in Abbottabad, 60 km (35 miles) north of the Pakistani capital Islamabad.

May 6, 2011 - Al Qaeda confirms bin Laden's death in an Internet message and vows not to abandon armed struggle .

-- It vows revenge on the United States and allies, and says bin Laden's death will be a curse "that chases the Americans and their agents," according to the SITE monitoring service.
 

Sources: Reuters; open-source material; Steve Coll: "The Bin Ladens"

(Writing by David Cutler, London Editorial Reference Unit; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

    Timeline: Osama bin Laden, his life and death, R, 6.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/06/us-binladen-qaeda-events-idUSTRE74530C20110506

Al Qaeda confirms bin Laden is dead

and vows revenge

ISLAMABAD | Fri May 6, 2011
10:33am EDT
Reuters
By Augustine Anthony

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Al Qaeda confirmed Osama bin Laden was dead on Friday, dispelling some of the fog around the killing of the "holy warrior," and vowed to mount more attacks on the West.

The announcement by the Islamist network, which promised to publish a taped message from bin Laden soon, appeared likely to silence doubts expressed by some that he had died at all.

In a statement online, it said bin Laden's blood "is more precious to us and to every Muslim than to be wasted in vain."

"It will remain, with permission from Allah the Almighty, a curse that hunts the Americans and their collaborators and chases them inside and outside their country."

Al Qaeda urged Pakistanis to rise up against their government to "cleanse" the country of what it called the shame brought on it by bin Laden's shooting and of the "filth of the Americans who spread corruption in it."

"Before the sheikh passed from this world and before he could share with the Islamic nation in its joys over its revolutions in the face of the oppressors, he recorded a voice recording of congratulations and advice which we will publish soon, God willing," the militant group said.

"We warn the Americans not to harm the corpse of the sheikh or expose it to any indecent treatment or to harm any members of his family, living or dead, and to deliver the corpses to their families," it added. U.S. officials say bin Laden's body has been buried at sea.

Anger and suspicion between Washington and Islamabad showed no sign of dispersing.

A U.S. drone killed 17 in northwest Pakistan, despite warnings from the Pakistani military against the mounting of attacks within its borders. Islamists in the south rallied to vow revenge for the shooting of the "martyr" bin Laden. Afghan Taliban and Islamist Indonesian youths made similar threats.

 

"FIVE YEARS" IN COMPOUND

One of Osama bin Laden's wives, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, told Pakistani interrogators the al Qaeda leader had been living for five years in the compound where he was killed by U.S. forces this week, a Pakistani security official told Reuters.

The revelation appeared sure to heighten U.S. suspicions that Pakistani authorities have been either grossly incompetent or playing a double game in the hunt for bin Laden and the two countries' supposed partnership against violent Islamism.

Pakistani security forces took between 15 and 16 people into custody from the Abbottabad compound after U.S. forces removed bin Laden's body, said the security official. Those detained included bin Laden's three wives and several children.

Surveillance of bin Laden's hideout from a CIA safe house in Abbottabad had led to his killing in the Navy SEAL operation, U.S. officials said.

The U.S. officials, quoted by the Washington Post, said the safe house had been the base for intelligence gathering that began after bin Laden's compound was discovered last August.

U.S. officials told the New York Times computer files and documents seized at his compound showed bin Laden had for years orchestrated attacks from the Pakistani town, and may have been planning a strike on U.S. railways this year.

The fact that bin Laden was found in a garrison town -- his compound was not far from a military academy -- has embarrassed Pakistan and the covert raid has angered its military.

On Thursday, the Pakistan army threatened to halt counter-terrorism cooperation with the United States if it conducted any more similar raids.

It was unclear if such attacks included drone strikes which the U.S. military regularly conducts against militants along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.

On Friday U.S. drone aircraft fired missiles into a house in North Waziristan region on Friday, killing at least 17 suspected militants.

Pakistani security officials have charged that U.S. troops, after landing by helicopter, shot the unarmed al Qaeda leader in cold blood rather than in a firefight, as U.S. officials first suggested.

One senior Pakistani official told Reuters on Friday: "We didn't find any bullet shells inside the house. There is no doubt that no shots were fired from there."

Another security official said: "If there was exchange of fire between U.S. Navy SEALS and people inside the house then they (Americans) should prove it. They must have footage of the operation. They should release it."

In Washington, people familiar with the latest U.S. government reporting on the raid told Reuters on Thursday only one of four principal targets shot dead by U.S. commandos had been involved in hostile fire.

U.S. officials originally spoke of a 40-minute firefight. The White House has blamed the "fog of war" for the changing accounts.

U.N. human rights investigators called on the United States to disclose the full facts "to allow an assessment in terms of international human rights law standards."

"It will be particularly important to know if the planning of the mission allowed an effort to capture bin Laden," Christof Heyns and Martin Scheinin said in a joint statement.

 

FEW QUALMS AMONG AMERICANS

Few Americans appear to have qualms about how bin Laden was killed, and on Thursday people cheered President Barack Obama when he visited the site of New York's twin towers, leveled by al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people.

But many Americans are questioning how bin Laden could live for years in a town teeming with military personnel, 50 km (30 miles) from Islamabad. Two U.S. lawmakers have complained about the billions in U.S. aid to impoverished Pakistan.

Seeking to repair ties, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Rome on Thursday that Washington was still anxious to maintain its alliance with Islamabad.

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 had aided al Qaeda.

Lobbyists for Pakistan in Washington have launched an intense campaign on Capitol Hill to counter accusations that Islamabad deliberately gave refuge to bin Laden.

 

(Additional reporting by Erika Solomon in Dubai, Michael Georgy in Islamabad and Reuters bureaux worldwide; writing by Andrew Roche; editing by Angus MacSwan)

    Al Qaeda confirms bin Laden is dead and vows revenge, R, 6.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/06/us-obama-statement-idUSTRE74107920110506

Al Qaeda plotted 9/11

anniversary rail attack: U.S.

WASHINGTON | Thu May 5, 2011
9:36pm EDT
Reuters
By James Vicini and Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Al Qaeda considered attacking the U.S. rail sector on the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, U.S. government officials said on Thursday in describing intelligence from Osama bin Laden's hide-out in Pakistan.

They said some evidence was found indicating the al Qaeda leader or his associates had engaged in discussions or planning for a possible attack on a train inside the United States on September 11, 2011.

"We have no information of any imminent terrorist threat to the U.S. rail sector, but wanted to make our partners aware of the alleged plotting," spokesman Matthew Chandler said of an intelligence message the Department of Homeland Security sent on Thursday.

The department and other U.S. agencies have been reviewing the treasure trove of information from bin Laden's compound in Pakistan seized by the United States during the raid this week that killed the al Qaeda leader.

An initial review of the information by U.S. intelligence analysts indicates that bin Laden, while in Abbottabad, played a direct role for years in plotting terror attacks, and was not just an inspirational figure to al Qaeda, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

"He wasn't just a figurehead," the Times quoted a U.S. official as saying. "He continued to plot and plan, to come up with ideas about targets, and to communicate those ideas to other senior Qaeda leaders."

The information on plotting against the U.S. rail sector indicated one possible tactic for attacking a train was trying to tip it somehow off its tracks, one official said.

The official said it appeared from the information that this was an idea that bin Laden or his associates considered, but there was no indication now from the intelligence that further plans were drawn up for the scheme or that steps were taken to carry it out.

Another official said al Qaeda in February last year contemplated the rail attack to occur on the 10th anniversary of the hijacked plane attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, but the group was not tied to that exact date.

Since the raid, the Department of Homeland Security has taken a number of steps in reviewing measures at all potential terrorist targets, including transportation systems across the country. It added more officers at airports and at the borders.

Chandler said the alleged al Qaeda plot was based on "initial reporting, which is often misleading or inaccurate and subject to change."

He added, "We remain at a heightened state of vigilance," but said there were no plans to raise the national threat level.

Officials have long been concerned that al Qaeda might try to carry out attacks on the U.S. rail system.

In 2008, U.S. authorities warned of a possible al Qaeda threat to transit systems in and around New York City over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

Last year, an Afghan immigrant pleaded guilty in New York to plotting a suicide bombing campaign on Manhattan's subway system in what U.S. authorities described as one of the most serious threats since the September 11 attacks.

 

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham and Vicki Allen)
 

    Al Qaeda plotted 9/11 anniversary rail attack: U.S., 5.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/06/us-usa-security-trains-idUSTRE7447VS20110506

Bin Laden, two others

didn't fire on SEALs: sources

WASHINGTON | Thu May 5, 2011
7:10pm EDT
By Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Only one of four principal targets shot dead by U.S. commandos in the raid which killed Osama bin Laden was involved in any hostile fire, a person familiar with the latest U.S. government reporting on the raid told Reuters on Thursday.

The account of Monday's daring 40-minute raid has new descriptions of the event, including that Navy SEALs shot an occupant of the compound who they thought was armed, but apparently was not.

It confirms that bin Laden was not armed when he was shot dead, nor are there indications that he directly threatened his attackers, according to the first source and a second U.S. government source who is familiar with briefings on the raid.

They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak for the record.

The Obama administration had given numerous, conflicting accounts of the raid this week, and it is possible these accounts will be revised yet again.

Here is a chronological version of what is now said to have happened on Monday when the SEAL team raided bin Laden's hide-out in Abbotabad, Pakistan:

A SEAL squad moved in darkness on the guest house, one of two dwellings inside the walls of bin Laden's compound. They were met with hostile fire. As they moved in, they shot a man who was in the guest house.

He turned out to be Abu Ahmed Al-Kuwaiti, the al Qaeda courier whose activities the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies had been investigating for years and who they believed would lead them to bin Laden.

After shooting al-Kuwaiti, the two sources familiar with official accounts said, U.S. commandos moved onto the compound's three-story main residence.

As they entered the house, they saw a man with his hands behind his back. Fearing that the man might be holding a weapon behind him, the commandos shot him dead.

It turned out that the man, who was the brother of Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti and another suspected al Qaeda courier, was not holding a weapon, according to the two sources familiar with official accounts.

However, the attackers did subsequently find weapons near the second man's body, the sources said.

After killing the second courier, commandos started climbing the stairs to the house's upper floors. As they climbed, a man charged down the stairs at them, and was shot dead. U.S. authorities now believe that he was Osama bin Laden's son.

As commandos proceeded up the stairs, the sources said, they saw a person they believed was bin Laden either poke his head out of a door or over a balcony. One of the sources said that the attackers took at least one shot at the person, who then retreated back inside the room he had come from.

The U.S. commandos proceeded to the top floor and into the room where the man had retreated. While entering the room, they were rushed by a woman. The woman, now believed to be one of bin Laden's wives, was shot in the leg.

After shooting her, the commandos pushed her to the side. Precisely what bin Laden then did, and what his reaction was when the commandos entered and shot his wife, is unclear.

But the people familiar with official accounts said the attackers did not wait for much of a reaction, and almost immediately shot the al Qaeda leader dead.

 

(Editing by Warren Strobel and Vicki Allen)

    Bin Laden, two others didn't fire on SEALs: sources, R, 5.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/05/us-binladen-raid-idUSTRE74482G20110505

Obama decides not to release

bin Laden photos

WASHINGTON/ABBOTTABAD | Wed May 4, 2011
7:13pm EDT
Reuters
By Jeremy Pelofsky and Kamran Haider

WASHINGTON/ABBOTTABAD (Reuters) - President Barack Obama decided on Wednesday not to release photographs of slain al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's body, saying they could incite violence and be used by militants as a propaganda tool.

Attorney General Eric Holder, seeking to head off suggestions that killing bin Laden was illegal, said the U.S. commandos who raided his Pakistani hide-out on Monday had carried out a justifiable act of national self-defense.

In deciding not to make public the pictures of the corpse, Obama resisted arguments that to do so could counter skeptics who have argued there is no proof that bin Laden, who was rapidly buried at sea by U.S. forces, is dead.

"I think that given the graphic nature of these photos, it would create some national security risk," Obama told the CBS program "60 Minutes."

"It is important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence. As a propaganda tool," the president added.

"There's no doubt that Bin Laden is dead," Obama said. "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."

Obama's decision followed intense debate in his administration. CIA Director Leon Panetta had said on Tuesday the pictures would be released.

Washington also had to weigh sensitivities in the Muslim world over what White House spokesman Jay Carney called "a gruesome photograph." U.S. Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte said she had seen a picture showing bin Laden's face and believed it confirmed his identity.

 

KILL OR CAPTURE

Defending the killing of what the White House has acknowledged was an unarmed bin Laden, Holder said he 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-defense," Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee, citing bin Laden's admission of being involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people.

It was lawful to target bin Laden because he was the enemy commander in the field and the operation was conducted in a way that was consistent with U.S. laws and values, he said, adding that it was a "kill or capture mission."

"If he had surrendered, attempted to surrender, I think we should obviously have accepted that, but there was no indication that he wanted to do that and therefore his killing was appropriate," he said.

U.S. acknowledgment on Tuesday that bin Laden held no weapon when shot dead had raised accusations Washington had breached international law. Exact circumstances of his death remained unclear and could yet fuel controversy, especially in the Muslim world.

Former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt called the killing "quite clearly a violation of international law." Geoffrey Robertson, a prominent London-based human rights lawyer, said the killing "may well have been a cold-blooded assassination" that risked making bin Laden a martyr.

Husayn al-Sawaf, 25, a playwright, said in Cairo: "The Americans behaved in the same way as bin Laden: with treachery and baseness. They should've tried him in a court. As for his burial, that's not Islamic. He should've been buried in soil."

But there has been no sign of mass protests or violent reaction on the streets in south Asia or the Middle East.

Pakistan, for its part, faced 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.

INTELLIGENCE LAPSES

Pakistan has welcomed bin Laden's death, but its Foreign Ministry expressed deep concerns about the raid, which it called an "unauthorized unilateral action."

The country blamed worldwide intelligence lapses for a failure to detect bin Laden, while Washington worked to establish 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.

An early U.S. account of the commando raid said bin Laden had taken part in a firefight with the helicopter-borne U.S. troops. Al Arabiya television suggested the architect of the 9/11 attacks was first taken prisoner and then shot.

The Arabic television station said a Pakistani security source "quoted the daughter of Osama bin Laden that the leader of al Qaeda was not killed inside his house, but had been arrested and was killed later."

Carney on Tuesday cited the "fog of war" as a reason for the initial misinformation on whether bin Laden was armed.

He insisted that bin Laden resisted when U.S. forces stormed his compound in the 40-minute operation, but would not say how. Panetta told PBS television the strike team opened fire in response to "threatening moves" as they reached the third-floor room where they found bin Laden.

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 boosted Obama's image, improving Americans' views of his leadership and his efforts to fight terrorism.

In Pakistan, the streets around bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad remained sealed off on Wednesday, with police and soldiers allowing only residents to pass through.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban, who harbored bin Laden until they were overthrown in late 2001, challenged the truth of his death, saying Washington had not provided "acceptable evidence to back up their claim" that he had been killed.

 

(Additional reporting by Reuters bureaux worldwide; Writing by Ralph Boulton and Patrick Worsnip; Editing by Anthony Boadle and Philip Barbara)

    Obama decides not to release bin Laden photos, R, 4.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/04/us-obama-statement-idUSTRE74107920110504

Pakistan threatens U.S.

on cooperation if more raids

ABBOTTABAD/NEW YORK | Thu May 5, 2011
7:04pm EDT
Reuters
By Augustine Anthony and Michelle Nichols

ABBOTTABAD/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Pakistan's army threatened on Thursday to reconsider its anti-terrorism cooperation with the United States if Washington carried out another unilateral attack like the killing of Osama bin Laden.

In New York, U.S. President Barack Obama met firefighters and visited Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan to offer comfort to a city still scarred by the September 11, 2001, attacks masterminded by bin Laden that killed nearly 3,000 people.

He said the killing of bin Laden by a U.S. commando team in Pakistan on Monday "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."

But a senior Pakistani security official said U.S. troops killed bin Laden in "cold blood," straining a relationship that Washington deems vital to defeating the al Qaeda movement that bin Laden led and winning its war in neighboring Afghanistan.

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.

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 in Abbottabad, a town just an hour's drive from the capital, said in its first comment since the attack that Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Kayani had sent a stern warning.

Kayani had "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.

However, 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.

Americans are questioning how the al Qaeda leader could live for years in comfort in a garrison town near Islamabad. Some call for cutting billions of dollars in U.S. aid.

SHOTS CONTROVERSY

In a further sign of fractious relations between the allies, senior Pakistani security officials told Reuters U.S. accounts had been misleading in describing a long gun battle at the compound where bin Laden and four others were killed by an elite squad of U.S. Navy SEALs.

After an initial account of a 40-minute firefight, U.S. officials have now been quoted saying only one person fired at the raiding party, and that only briefly as the helicopter-borne assault team arrived.

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 drawn criticism in the Arab world and Europe, where some have warned of a backlash against the West.

The White House has blamed the "fog of war" for its changing accounts. Citing U.S. officials, NBC television said bin Laden and three of the four others killed were unarmed.

The New York Times quoted officials in the Obama administration as saying bin Laden's courier fired the only shots against the Americans, in the early stages of the raid, from a guesthouse in the sprawling, high-walled compound.

"I know for a fact that shots were exchanged during this operation," said one Pentagon official. But one senior Pakistani security official said no shots were fired at the SEALs inside the building where bin Laden was found.

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee's top Republican, Saxby Chambliss, offered new details. He said the SEALs shot at, but missed, bin Laden as he looked out of a third-floor room. "He went back in the room, and that's when the SEALs rushed in and shot him the first time," Chambliss told National Journal in an interview.

U.S.-PAKISTAN FRICTION

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 smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center three days after the September 11 attacks: "The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."

Obama went to a firehouse that lost 15 members in the attacks, before heading to Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan to lay a wreath and meet with victims' families.

He shook hands with firefighters and told them: "This is a symbolic site of the extraordinary sacrifice that was made on that terrible day almost 10 years ago."

"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.

New York City resident Caroline Epner, 32, said: "It's OK for him (Obama) to take a victory lap."

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.

In Rome for talks on aiding Libya's rebels, Clinton reminded her international audience that bin Laden had been a clear target for the United States since 2001 and that his death did not end the battle against al Qaeda.

Her call for continuing good ties with Islamabad was echoed in Washington by Republican House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, who said it was "not the time to back away from Pakistan."

Two mid-level al Qaeda leaders were killed in Yemen on Thursday in a remote province where al Qaeda is active, the news service of the Yemeni defense ministry said, and residents said they saw a drone in the air at the time. The United States is known to operate drones in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere.

In Washington, a top U.S. Marine Corps general said on Thursday the raid that killed bin Laden could deal a significant blow to the Afghan Taliban insurgency.

Major General Richard Mills said the Navy SEALs had carted away information likely to provide an intelligence bonanza. "I think it will identify people who are providing ... material support to the insurgency in Afghanistan," he said.

    Pakistan threatens U.S. on cooperation if more raids, R, 5.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/05/us-obama-statement-idUSTRE74107920110505

Analysis:

Pakistan's mixed messages

on bin Laden sow confusion

LONDON/ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan | Thu May 5, 2011
6:54pm EDT
Reuters
By Myra MacDonald and Kamran Haider

LONDON/ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) - Faced with the uncomfortable news that Osama bin Laden was killed on their territory, Pakistani officials have tied themselves in knots with contradictory statements that have left most people bewildered.

Did Pakistan provide help which it is denying to avoid a domestic backlash? Or did Washington act entirely alone? Did the Pakistan Army really not know, as it says, that bin Laden was living right next to the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA)?

"Let's have some answers," wrote Pakistani columnist Ejaz Haider, calling the government statement on what happened "nonsense, at its most nonsensical."

When news broke on Monday that U.S. forces killed bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad, some 50 kms (30 miles) from Islamabad, many said the Pakistan Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency must have been involved.

"It was a joint intelligence operation," one Pakistani security official said. "We shared information, intelligence and without our cooperation, this could not be done."

Local residents in Abbottabad were convinced the army -- traditionally one of the most respected institutions in the country -- could not have been caught napping by the Americans.

"It is not possible that Pakistan did not know about the operation," said 60-year-old resident Manzoor Ahmed. "The building is close to the PMA. Was our army sleeping?"

"From the Pakistani and U.S. authorities, there seems to be a well-coordinated effort to create the impression that Pakistan was kept in the dark about the operation," wrote Pakistani columnist Mosharraf Zaidi.

"Just because the "exclusion of Pakistan' fable suits both countries however, doesn't make it necessarily true."

Pakistan, facing a wave of bombings, had long maintained it wanted to get al Qaeda out of the region, paving the way for a settlement with Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan to end a war which has increasingly spilled across its borders.

Bin Laden's death helped make that possible, and background briefings by officials added to the impression Pakistan had helped, while maintaining enough "plausible deniability" to avoid the backlash it suffered after troops attacked Islamists holed up in the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, in Islamabad in 2007.

In India, which has harbored suspicions for a decade that Pakistan had al Qaeda leaders in safe-keeping as a bargaining chip to use with Washington -- allegations it denies -- intelligence sources said the Pakistan Army might have helped.

One source said it seemed certain it was a joint operation, "but there is no glory for Pakistan owning it."

In a column in the Washington Post, President Asif Ali Zardari wrote that "Pakistan did its part" in helping to provide the intelligence which led to bin Laden, though he said Pakistan had not been involved in the operation itself.

But in Washington, where President Barack Obama had said that "our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding," U.S. officials said with increasing vehemence that the United States had acted alone.

WATCHING THE COMPOUND

A Pakistan government statement issued on Tuesday confused the picture further. "Abbottabad and the surrounding areas have been under sharp focus of intelligence agencies since 2003."

"As far as the target compound is concerned, ISI had been sharing information with CIA and other friendly intelligence agencies since 2009," the foreign ministry statement said.

"Really?" asked columnist Haider. "If that is true then what stopped the ISI from a 'friendly' visit to the compound to find out who might be living there?"

The Pakistan Army has been a target for Pakistani militants since the raid on the Lal Masjid, and would have been unlikely to have taken any risks in a town near its military academy and where many soldiers live.

An intelligence official, talking to Reuters, made no reference to 2009, but noted instead that Pakistani intelligence agents had years earlier trailed a militant courier to a house in Abbottabad which may have been in the same compound where bin Laden was killed.

Zardari mentioned in his column that Pakistan had helped through "our early assistance in identifying an al-Qaeda courier" and the government statement specifically cited 2003.

But former president Pervez Musharraf, in his memoirs "In the Line of Fire," dated the courier's arrest to 2004.

While Islamabad struggled to get its story straight, Washington -- which has had its own problems keeping a clear narrative on the raid -- insisted Pakistan was not involved.

"It was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission: They might alert the targets," CIA director Leon Panetta told Time magazine.

On Thursday, the Pakistan Army put out its first public statement on bin Laden. It was somewhat different from the one issued by the civilian government.

And since the military and its intelligence agencies dominate security policy, the government would have had to get its information on what actually happened from the army.

A statement released by the army after its chief, General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, held a meeting with his Corps Commanders on what it called "the Abbottabad incident," said that:

"While admitting own shortcomings in developing intelligence on the presence of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, it was highlighted that the achievements of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), against al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates in Pakistan, have no parallel."

"However, in the case of Osama bin Laden, while the CIA developed intelligence based on initial information provided by ISI, it did not share further development of intelligence on the case with ISI..."

The short statement then asserted that Pakistan's nuclear bombs were not as vulnerable to unexpected hostile action of the kind seen in the unauthorized U.S. raid in Abbottabad.

"...unlike an undefended civilian compound, our strategic assets are well protected and an elaborate defensive mechanism is in place."

 

(Additional reporting by Sanjeev Miglani in Singapore and Chris Chris Allbritton in Islamabad; Editing by Michael Roddy)

    Analysis: Pakistan's mixed messages on bin Laden sow confusion, R, 5.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/05/us-binladen-pakistan-messaging-idUSTRE7447ZF20110505

Pakistan pays U.S. lobbyists

to deny it helped bin Laden

WASHINGTON | Thu May 5, 2011
6:53pm EDT
By Tim Reid

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Pakistan's Washington lobbyists have launched an intense campaign on Capitol Hill to counter accusations that Islamabad was complicit in giving refuge to Osama bin Laden.

Alarmed by lawmakers' demands to cut off billions of dollars of U.S. aid after bin Laden was found living in a Pakistani safe house for six years, President Asif Ali Zardari has ordered a full-court press to quell mounting accusations that it helped the al Qaeda leader avoid capture.

Mark Siegel, a partner in the Washington lobbying firm of Locke Lord Strategies -- which is paid $75,000 a month by the Pakistani government -- told Reuters on Thursday he had spoken twice to Zardari since U.S. special forces killed bin Laden on Sunday, and "countless" times to the Pakistani ambassador in Washington.

"They are certainly concerned," Siegel said, adding that suggestions the Pakistani government knew about bin Laden's whereabouts was nothing more than speculation.

Referring to a statement by President Barack Obama's counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, that there must have been a support system for bin Laden inside Pakistan, Siegel said: "There is no proof that a support system was government-based."

There is much at stake for Pakistan as many lawmakers question how bin Laden could have lived in a large fortified compound close to a Pakistani military base for so long.

Some members of Congress are now demanding that nearly $3 billion in annual aid for Pakistan, included in Obama's 2012 budget, be blocked until the Zardari administration explains how bin Laden lived untouched just 30 miles outside Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. Pakistan has received over $20 billion in U.S. aid since the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate subcommittee that allocates foreign aid, said on Thursday he wants a complete review of U.S. aid to Pakistan.

Leahy said he was certain that some Pakistani military and intelligence officials knew that bin Laden was hiding so close to Islamabad.

"It's impossible for them not to have some idea he was there," Leahy told Vermont Public Radio.

But Siegel, referring to claims by the Afghan government that Pakistan must have known bin Laden's whereabouts, said: "Must have known doesn't mean knew."

Siegel's firm was retained by the Zardari government in 2008 and has earned nearly $2 million in fees since then, according to Justice Department records. Siegel said his firm is paid $900,000 a year by Pakistan.

Since bin Laden's death, Siegel says he has been on Capitol Hill every day to promote Pakistan's position on the bin Laden killing, talking to congressmen, senators and their aides.

 

(Editing by Xavier Briand)

    Pakistan pays U.S. lobbyists to deny it helped bin Laden, 5.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/05/us-binladen-pakistan-lobbying-idUSTRE7445GK20110505

After bin Laden death,

Obama visits Ground Zero

NEW YORK | Thu May 5, 2011
6:53pm EDT
By Mark Egan and Jeff Mason

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Days after the killing of Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama met New York firefighters and police on Thursday and visited Ground Zero to offer comfort to a city still scarred by the September 11 attacks.

His predecessor, George W. Bush, just three days after hijacked planes destroyed the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, had stood bullhorn in hand in the 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.

He said the killing of bin Laden told the world "that when we say we will never forget, we mean what we say."

Obama visited Engine 54 in midtown, which with 15 deaths lost more members on 9/11 than any other firehouse, before heading to Lower Manhattan to talk with police and lay a wreath at Ground Zero, the Twin Towers site, where he also met with victims' families.

Obama told firefighters at the "Pride of Manhattan" firehouse, "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. "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.

Talat Hamdani, 59, whose New York police cadet son, Salman, 23, was killed in the September 11 attacks, met Obama along with other families of victims at the World Trade Center site and said it was a "very healing" experience.

"I thanked him for being there for me today and ... that I was very proud of him as our president," said Hamdani, who moved to the United States from Pakistan. "He was there sharing our feelings ... many people broke down."

She cried as she showed a picture of Salman and told Obama her Pakistani-born son had been a "proud American."

Bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader who masterminded the September 11, 2001, attacks, 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, and a Pennsylvania field.

"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 from Bellport, New York, who said he worked at Ground Zero clearing debris and waited to see Obama.

New York City resident Caroline Epner, 32 said, "It's OK for him to take a victory lap."

RED, WHITE AND BLUE

Obama later met New York police, thanked them and urged them to be vigilant, saying extremist threats remained.

At Ground Zero during a sunny afternoon, Obama laid a wreath of red, white and blue flowers to honor those who died. He then paused for a moment of silence.

Obama, who made no remarks at the site, greeted relatives of victims. The brief ceremony took place by the "Survivor's Tree," which survived the attacks and was nursed back to health and then returned to be part of the memorial that will open on the 10th anniversary of the attacks.

He stood in a place that almost a decade ago was the pulverized remains of what were once the world's tallest buildings, which for weeks after the attacks spread a ghoulish dust over Lower Manhattan.

Visible progress in the $11 billion project to rebuild the World Trade Center site is now being made after delays from political, security and financing concerns. The 1,776-foot (541-meter) centerpiece, 1 World Trade Center, already stands more than 60 stories high.

Democrat Obama had invited Bush to join him, but the Republican declined, saying through his spokesman he had preferred to remain out of the spotlight since leaving office in 2009.

Some among the thousands at Ground Zero, where many waved American flags, said they would have liked to see Bush return to the site on Thursday.

"I want to thank Bush for what he started and Obama for what he finished," said Al Smith, 52, who said he delivered newspapers to the Twin Towers hours before they collapsed.

At the Pentagon, Vice President Joe Biden placed a wreath by a blackened stone, charred by flames after a plane crashed into the building, inscribed with the words "September 11, 2001" which honors the people killed there.

September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows urged Obama to close the U.S. military prison housing foreign terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and bring home American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Bin Laden's killing 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 since 9/11.

Several recent polls showed Obama's job approval rating boosted after bin Laden's death, although such bounces are often short-lived. Obama's popularity before the 2012 election where he is seeking a second term had been hurt by economic woes and high gasoline prices.

 

(Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols; Writing by Mark Egan; Editing by Peter Cooney)

    After bin Laden death, Obama visits Ground Zero, R, 5.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/05/us-binladen-newyork-idUSTRE7445DD20110505

Obama defends

bin Laden sea burial

as "respectful"

WASHINGTON | Thu May 5, 2011
5:33pm EDT
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said U.S. forces were "respectful of the body" of Osama bin Laden when they buried his remains at sea, despite criticism from some Muslim clerics that it violated Islamic practice.

"We took more care on this than, obviously, bin Laden took when he killed 3,000 people. He didn't have much regard for how they were treated and desecrated," Obama told CBS's "60 Minutes" program, referring to the September 11, 2001, attacks that the al Qaeda leader masterminded.

"But that, again, is something that makes us different. And I think we handled it appropriately," Obama said, according to an advance excerpt of an interview that will air in full on Sunday.

Questions have multiplied since the White House said bin Laden was unarmed when U.S. helicopter-borne commandos shot and killed him on Monday at the fortified villa where he had been hiding in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.

Bin Laden's swift burial at sea from the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the north Arabian sea has also stirred misgivings, with some Muslims saying it was done contrary to Islamic custom.

U.S. officials have insisted that bin Laden's body was washed and that Islamic prayers were recited in accordance with religious laws. They said there was concern that a grave could have served as a shrine and rallying point for his followers.

"It was a joint decision," Obama said when asked whether he personally made the decision for burial at sea. "We thought it was important to think through ahead of time how we would dispose of the body if he were killed in the compound."

"And I think that what we tried to do was -- consulting with experts in Islamic law and ritual-- to find something that was appropriate, that was, respectful of the body," Obama added.

Saudi Sheikh Abdul Mohsen Al-Obaikan, an adviser to the Saudi Royal Court, said: "That is not the Islamic way. The Islamic way is to bury the person in land (if he has died on land) like all other people."

 

(Reporting by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Vicki Allen)

    Obama defends bin Laden sea burial as "respectful", R, 5.5.2011,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/05/us-binladen-obama-burial-idUSTRE7447M620110505

Pakistan army

will "review" U.S. cooperation

if more raids

ISLAMABAD | Thu May 5, 2011
11:57am EDT
Reuters
By Zeeshan Haider

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan's army, facing rare criticism at home after U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden in a raid, said it will review its intelligence and military cooperation with the United States if more unilateral attacks are conducted.

It was the first comment from the army since the May 2 attack that killed bin Laden.

While Pakistan has objected to the raid as a violation of its sovereignty while suspicion that some Pakistani security forces might have known bin Laden was hiding in the country has also threatened to strain ties between the uneasy allies.

Pakistan has denied any knowledge of the al Qaeda leader's whereabouts and the army said it would conduct an investigation into failures by its intelligence to detect the world's most wanted man on its own soil.

"COAS 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 in a statement, referring to the Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Kayani.

Pakistani cooperation is seen as crucial for efforts to end the war in neighboring Afghanistan.

The army also warned it would respond "very strongly" if its old rival India carried out any "misadventure", saying: "There should be no doubt about it."

The Pakistan army, which has long been seen as the most effective institution in an unstable country, has been facing growing domestic criticism over the perceived violation of country's sovereignty when U.S. forces conducted raid without informing Pakistan.

U.S. special forces swooped in on helicopters to attack a compound in Abbottabad, 50 km (30 miles) north of the capital, Islamabad, and kill bin Laden and several others.

The Pakistani government said bin Laden's death was a milestone in the fight against militancy but two Pakistani security officials, who declined to be identified, said the al Qaeda leader and his comrades offered no resistance.

One of the officials said their killing was "cold-blooded".

Pakistan is facing growing international pressure to explain how was it possible for bin Laden to live in a compound in a garrison town close to the military's main academy.

Western as well as Indian and Afghan officials have accused Pakistan's main Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency of maintaining links with militants for use as proxy fighters against India, and to maintain influence in Afghanistan once foreign troops leave that country.

The military said there had been intelligence failures over the presence of bin Laden but it praised the ISI's role in combating al Qaeda and its allies.

"While admitting own shortcomings in developing intelligence on the presence of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, it was highlighted that the achievements of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), against al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates in Pakistan, have no parallel," the army said after a meeting of commanders.

 

INVESTIGATION

The army said about 100 top-level al Qaeda leaders and operators had been killed or arrested by the ISI, with or without support of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

"However, in the case of Osama Bin Laden, while CIA developed intelligence based on initial information (about the compound) provided by the ISI, it did not share further development of intelligence on the case with the ISI, contrary to the existing practice between the two services."

"Nonetheless, an investigation has been ordered into the circumstances that led to this situation," it said.

The military commanders were told that Pakistan had decided to reduce the strength of U.S. military personnel in the country to the "minimum essential".

The top brass also ruled out the possibility of similar attacks on the country's nuclear facilities.

"Unlike an undefended civilian compound, our strategic assets are well protected and an elaborate defensive mechanism is in place," the army said.

While few in Pakistan supported bin Laden and his ideology, violations of sovereignty can provoke street protests and media outrage.

One of Pakistan's main Islamic parties called for protests on Friday against what it said was breach of sovereignty, and urged the government to withdraw its support for the U.S.-led war on al Qaeda and it allies.

Following the unusual criticism of the army, which has ruled Pakistan for more than half the 64 years since its independence, the military's remarks appeared aimed at reassuring Pakistanis that it was capable of defending the country.

"The (commanders) reiterated the resolve to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Pakistan to fight the menace of terrorism, with the support and help of the people of Pakistan," the army said.

 

(Additional reporting by Saeed Azhar;

Editing by Rebecca Conway, Chris Allbritton

and Robert Birsel)

Pakistan army will "review" U.S. cooperation if more raids, R, 5.5.2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/05/us-binladen-pakistan-idUSTRE7432ZW20110505