Osama Bin Laden Killed

[Señor Hoff]

[Buggernut]

Here ya go!

[Sharpshooter]

[Señor Hoff]

.

[Wetcoaster]

Ding Dong! Bin Laden is dead. Which old Bin Laden? The Wicked Bin Laden

Ding Dong! The Wicked Bin Laden is dead.

Wake up - sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed.

Wake up, the Wicked Bin Laden is dead. He's gone where the goblins go,

Below - below - below. Yo-ho, let's open up and sing and ring the bells out.

Ding Dong' the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low.

Let them know

The Wicked Bin Laden is dead!

......sing to the tune The Witch is Dead from The Wizard of Oz

I can't get the tune out of my head now so I had to share

All together now!

Ding Dong.........

[Guest Voucer]

I'm a bit skeptical. Too many things don't make sense. I have a feeling many of the details have been exaggerated or even fabricated.

1. Osama Bin Laden, one of the world's most wanted criminals, has no guards living with him? Really? There were only 5 casualties, three of whom were Bin Laden, his wife and his son. A group of Navy SEALS vs four men (in an ambush, no less) is a struggle. In such a huge complex with so many defense mechanisms to protect Bin Laden, there aren't any guards?

Q Were there any civilian -- I mean, how many civilian casualties were there?

MR. BRENNAN: Bin Laden died; the two al Qaeda facilitators -- the brothers, who were -- the courier and his brother in the compound; bin Laden's son Hamza; and the woman, presumed to be his wife, who was shielding bin Laden.

[DonLever]

You have a point, if you are the world's most wanted terrorist, you would want a small army protecting you. Where were all the guards?

[Homo Sapiens' Sapience]

[megamind]

I can say the same thing about the US government... the FBI doesn't have enough evidence to implicate them either.

[Zamboni_14]

Sinclair Lewis: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

"It is difficult to get FBI to understand or to implicate the government when their salaries depend upon their not understand or knowing it.

[German_Canucks_Supporter]

the problem is it's easier to point out what's gone wrong with events that have happened vs events that never took place.

What if after 9/11 the US said oh well no biggie? What if the US didn't invade Afghanistan?

Essentially 9/11 brought to the forefront on a daily basis what had been simmering in the background all along.

Terrorism went from: "oh some guy hickjacked a plane and wants some money/prisoners released" and "oh some big explosion happened on some far off country" to "crap these guys are serious."

Not sure how many people remember the Algerian guy Ressam(sp?) that was found with a trunk (boot) full of explosives planning to blow up LAX. He had been plotting and preparing his act in Vancouver (burnaby if I remember).

Did anyone at that time even remotely foresee the "seriousness" of the event? Probably not most people passed that off as "oh another crazy trying to kill a few yanks."

Bombings in London and Madrid reaffirmed that. Near misses in Germany and Canada also reaffirmed that.

I'm curious as to why you wouldn't trust US media sources but would trust German ones?

I don't agree with what the US has done all the time but maybe it's time for other countries Germany, Canada *cough cough* to play a bigger role in global and specifically western security.

[suolucidir]

You have a point, if you are the world's most wanted terrorist, you would want a small army protecting you. Where were all the guards?

[Jaimito]

duplicate

[Jaimito]

You have a point, if you are the world's most wanted terrorist, you would want a small army protecting you. Where were all the guards?

[لني]

From Jason Burke considered one of the foremost experts on bin Laden and AQ.

I've read one of his books and it worthwhile if you're interested in learning more.

With so many potential al-Qaida leaders killed or captured over the past 10 years, there is not one standing who has a credible chance of imposing himself as overall leader of the core organisation.

The most obvious candidate to succeed Osama bin Laden is his Egyptian associate, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

But he, like the other potential leadership candidates, has several flaws that only serve to demonstrate how unique "the sheikh" was.

Zawahiri, a 59-year-old former paediatrician, has none of Bin Laden's charisma and little of his talent for propaganda. He is strong on ideology and strategy but his attempts to communicate are often painfully clumsy. Recent videos in which he has removed his thick-lensed spectacles, presumably to make himself look younger or less scholarly, merely reveal how out of touch he is. Even his Egyptian origins are likely to be divisive in an organisation increasingly dominated by Libyans and Saudis and rent by factional tensions.

The second contender might come from among the younger leadership figures, some heavily promoted in a series of propaganda videos as al-Qaida has tried to fight its creeping marginalisation in recent years.

But even the inexperienced Abu Yayha al-Libi, in his mid-40s and credited with a legendary escape from a high-security prison in Afghanistan, can never replace Bin Laden.

The dead leader had a rare combination of talents which held his group together. He may have made grotesque strategic errors – like thinking the US too morally decadent to fight before 9/11 – but he commanded huge loyalty. Without him, the al-Qaida hardcore is now likely to definitively fracture.

The hardcore leadership has always been defined as Bin Laden and Zawahiri, and a few score associates with them in Pakistan. According to recent intelligence reports, largely based on the interviews of detainees, these are less numerous than often thought. Degraded by recent drone strikes, there are maybe only 80 or 100 senior al-Qaida militants still operative in Pakistan.

Certainly, many potential leadership candidates have been killed over the last 10 years. One of the first to die was Mohammed Atef, the former military commander killed in November 2001. One of the latest, Abu Mustafa al-Yazidi, a polylingual veteran who played linkman between al-Qaida and the Afghan Taliban, died in 2009. A whole bench of potential leaders has been wiped out.

Many others have been captured. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks, was picked up in Rawalpindi in 2003. Never a formal member of al-Qaida, he was unlikely to make the top ranks. Both Abu Farraj al-Libi, picked up by the Pakistanis in 2005, and Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, detained on the Iraqi border, were capable and committed operators but neither was charismatic enough to lead.

Alongside Yayha al-Libi and his peers there is an even younger generation, but they are unknown and untried.

Decentralisation was always an integral part of Bin Laden's strategy, with al-Qaida conceived as an umbrella group, channelling and focusing the diverse energies of the various groups active across the Islamist world in the 1990s, but it is hard to see how one of the affiliate groups or the "network of networks" could provide a leader now.

Each group has remained largely independent of the main al-Qaida leadership, and there is the problem of the fundamental parochialism of al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsular (largely Yemen), in the Maghreb (largely Algeria), and in Iraq. Each is rooted in specific local factors and history. Faced with significant challenges in reconciling global agendas with local realities, they are more likely to go their own way than try to pursue the chimerical dream of a united international jihad that Bin Laden dedicated much of his life to.

One exception might be the freelance US-born preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, currently in Yemen where he grew up. Through internet sermons and his slick magazine Inspire, 40-year-old Awlaki has the reach and has shown the ambition to, if not lead al-Qaida, then to fill the space Bin Laden has left. He is young, eloquent, speaks English and Arabic and can reach out to many different audiences. Awlaki's profile and success is a reminder of how al-Qaida was always only one of scores of radical groups that together constituted the dynamic, varied and evolving phenomenon of Sunni Muslim violent extremism.

An important question is what effect the leader's death will have on the ideological impact of al-Qaida. "My life or death does not matter. The awakening has started," Bin Laden boasted in late 2001. But it is not clear whether he will prove correct.

Bin Laden's greatest success was to make his particular interpretation of radical Islamism globally known. There were other strands of militant thinking and strategy around in the late 1990s but 20 years of "propaganda by deed" made Bin Laden's the dominant one. A thriving jihadi subculture has emerged. Al-Qaida has become, in many ways, a social movement. Bin Laden's death means the removal of the iconic figure at the centre of this construct.

Also, many of the myriad factors that have fed radical militancy in recent decades – some of which stretch back decades or even centuries in the Islamic world or in the Islamic world's relationship with the west – are still has potent as ever. We are living in a new era of polarisation, conspiracy theory and religious identity. The strategic impact of Bin Laden's actions depended in part on the reaction of his enemies, particularly the United States. The consequences of his death do so, too.

That said, in recent years the increasing marginalisation of al-Qaida – culturally, socially and geographically – has been very clear. The Arab Spring demonstrated how Bin Laden's message had been rejected by those hundreds of millions he once sought to radicalise and mobilise. Al-Qaida had orchestrated no major successful attack for more than five years. The recruits were coming to the makeshift Pakistani camps but only in enough numbers to assure the core group's survival, not its success, at least not in the short-term.

One of the most important figures in Islamist militancy's recent history was Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian as his nom de guerre or kunya suggests, who formulated a complex theory of "leaderless jihad". This, he imagined, would see militants all over the Islamic world and beyond acting independently according to a blueprint uploaded to the internet (and written) by Suri himself . At one moment, in around 2004 or 2005, it looked like his vision was becoming a reality. Suri certainly thought so, boasting that the London 7/7 bombings showed the beginnings of a "global intifada". He was wrong and was detained in Pakistan shortly after the London attacks and is now, almost certainly, in a Syrian jail.

The most probable scenario in the future is continuing, low-level violence and threat shifting around the periphery of the Islamist world, depending on local circumstances and the emergence of new leaders able to galvanise fresh networks. But there is unlikely to be a genuine successor to Bin Laden, either as head of al-Qaida, or as pre-eminent global icon of jihad.

[nucklehead]

Nope. Ain't dead yet...

Well, that dip seems to have done him some good then...

[UFCanuck]

You have a point, if you are the world's most wanted terrorist, you would want a small army protecting you. Where were all the guards?

[Jaimito]

Good read on the details of the hunt. Can't wait to see the movie!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/world/asia/03intel.html?hp

May 2, 2011

Behind the Hunt for Bin Laden

By MARK MAZZETTI, HELENE COOPER and PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — For years, the agonizing search for Osama bin Laden kept coming up empty. Then last July, Pakistanis working for the Central Intelligence Agency drove up behind a white Suzuki navigating the bustling streets near Peshawar, Pakistan, and wrote down the car’s license plate.

The man in the car was Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, and over the next month C.I.A. operatives would track him throughout central Pakistan. Ultimately, administration officials said, he led them to a sprawling compound at the end of a long dirt road and surrounded by tall security fences in a wealthy hamlet 35 miles from the Pakistani capital.

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

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

For an intelligence community that had endured searing criticism for a string of intelligence failures over the past decade, Bin Laden’s killing brought a measure of redemption. For a military that has slogged through two, and now three vexing wars in Muslim countries, it provided an unalloyed success. And for a president whose national security leadership has come under question, it proved an affirming moment that will enter the history books.

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

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

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

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

The code name for Bin Laden was “Geronimo.” The president and his advisers watched Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, on a video screen, narrating from his agency’s headquarters across the Potomac River what was happening in faraway Pakistan.

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

Minutes passed.

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

A few minutes later: “Geronimo EKIA.”

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

Finally, the president spoke up.

“We got him.”

Filling in the Gaps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weighing the Options

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Across the Border

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reporting was contributed by Elisabeth Bumiller, Charlie Savage and Steven Lee Myers from Washington, Adam Ellick from New York, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan.

[Bieksa(not really)]

hmm The "scrambled" Pakistani military had at least 40 minutes to travel 2 miles down the

road to check out what was happening, and didn't get there. This part of the story has been

bothering me.

[Jaimito]

hmm The "scrambled" Pakistani military had at least 40 minutes to travel 2 miles down the

road to check out what was happening, and didn't get there. This part of the story has been

bothering me.