OSAMA BIN LADEN DEAD

[MKSheppard]

Link (OBL's Next door neighbor is a medical officer in the Pakistani Army Medical Corps!)

By Dean Nelson, Abbottabad 9:00PM BST 03 May 2011

Major Amir Aziz, a 45-year-old officer serving as a commander in the Army Medical Corps, lives barely 80 yards from the compound where the world's most wanted terrorist leader evaded an American-led manhunt for up to five years.

He was unavailable at his Doric columned high-security mansion on Tuesday in Thanda Choha or 'cool pond' village in Abbottabad yesterday. But an Urdu name plaque on the door confirmed the owner's title and villagers, including policemen, said Major Aziz was a serving soldier heading a non-combat unit.

The disclosure came amid growing suspicion that some sections of Pakistan's powerful security services may have helped him hide in the shadow of its Military Academy at Kakul, one of the country's highest security garrison towns.

Lieutenant-General Talat Masood, a retired senior officer and close supporter of Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kiyani, said he believed some elements of its security establishment had colluded to protect Osama bin Laden. "I would think it's probably complicity at some level, otherwise it would be impossible," he said.

"People in Pakistan want to know who is living next [door]. Someone must have been going in and coming out. I'm puzzled and ashamed," he added.

His outspoken comments followed reports that Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency had said it was embarrassed by its failure to detect bin Laden hiding in one of its highest security cantonments.

Neighbours who had witnessed the American air raid which killed bin Laden, his courier, son and one of his wives in the early hours of Monday morning, said they had not inquired closely about their secretive guest because of rumours that either drug dealers or smugglers were living there.

"There was a rumour these were black money, white powder people and with a rumour like that you don't like to knock the door," said steel contractor Hussein Jaffri, who watched the American helicopters hover 50 yards away over bin Laden's compound during the raid.

The village's children were not so timid. According to ice cream seller Tanvir Ahmed, boys who knocked on the heavy green security gates of the barbed-wire walled compound after hitting a cricket ball into its garden were told they couldn't come in to look for it. "They were given money instead, 50 to 100 rupees for a ball worth 30 rupees," he said.

Eleven-year-old Asra Amjad revealed that the face of global terror may have been a rabbit lover. She had seen one of the compound staff, a Pashtun man named Nadeem, collecting grass in nearby cannabis-fringed fields and asked him why. When he told her it was for his rabbits, she asked if she could have one. He later delivered two as a gift. There were two Pashtun brothers in their 30s, at least two women and three children, two boys of five and six and girl of four living with them.

One of the brothers, known to villagers as Nadeem, left the compound each day in a red Suzuki minivan and returned with a goat, fruit and vegetables. Villagers said there were two buffalo in the compound to provide milk.

One elderly woman said five months earlier Nadeem had taken her to a local clinic in the minivan.

Others however complained that security men at the compound had emerged to warn them to leave if they leant against its 15 feet high walls.

Another villager said an elderly neighbour had complained he had been moved on several occasions after compound staff had seen him on security cameras smoking cannabis just beyond the walls.

The local land registrar, said the plot had been bought in 2005 by a Arshad Khan, a Pashtun from Charsadda, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, for around $100,000 and building had begun soon after. It had been bought from several villagers. Labourers told them their new neighbours had built underground chambers in the basement, while the building became known as the 'Waziristan Haveli' because of the association between Pashtuns and militant Islam.

None however could believe Osama bin Laden had lived among them. Retired teacher Aslam Khan, 71, "The best thing is that the picture should be made public. Seeing is believing," he said.

[Sea Skimmer]

There's no reason you'd use V-22 in this scenario.

Yeah, the thing is just plain bigger, far bigger then necessary. I'm convinced they planned to crash the H-60, while a V-22 would be so big even trying to crash land becomes dubious. Though it would still rank above the rocket C-130 for Iran in sanity.

[Darksider]

Rocket C-130?

Ok, I need to hear details on that one.

[MKSheppard]

Link

...There is international interest in how the al-Qaeda chief came to spend his final months just a few hundred yards from Kakul military academy, Pakistan's equivalent of Sandhurst. It seems inconceivable that he was not under official protection. Pakistan is one of the most close-knit societies in the world, where everyone knows each other's business. Even if bin Laden didn't personally venture out, it is likely that known friends and associates would have visited, and would have been observed.

Furthermore, this is a country where terrorist attacks on the armed forces are, sadly, routine events. So the military would have been obliged to check out every single house in the town, especially a big, slightly mysterious and heavily fortified structure such as the one that hosted al-Qaeda's leader in his final days. General David Petraeus visited Abbottabad as recently as last November, when bin Laden was reportedly already present – an event in itself that would have made a major security search inevitable. That is why so many are coming to believe the theory that Pakistan's army was complicit in hiding bin Laden...

[erik_t]

There's no reason you'd use V-22 in this scenario.

Yeah, the thing is just plain bigger, far bigger then necessary. I'm convinced they planned to crash the H-60, while a V-22 would be so big even trying to crash land becomes dubious. Though it would still rank above the rocket C-130 for Iran in sanity.

Intentional crash and hull loss became somewhat less likely in my mind once we saw that this wasn't quite an ordinary H-60.

[weemadando]

There's no reason you'd use V-22 in this scenario.

Yeah, the thing is just plain bigger, far bigger then necessary. I'm convinced they planned to crash the H-60, while a V-22 would be so big even trying to crash land becomes dubious. Though it would still rank above the rocket C-130 for Iran in sanity.

Intentional crash and hull loss became somewhat less likely in my mind once we saw that this wasn't quite an ordinary H-60.

Everything I've seen/heard has indicated that it was a stall, followed by controlled crash landing and they were unable to get it in the air again and blew it in place.

[Broomstick]

EDIT: Mind you Shep posted something a few pages back about him vetoing a plan to have a B-2 overfly the compound and level it, and I can totally believe that. Flying an (IIRC) nuclear-capable bomber into foreign airspace without informing them could touch off a whole mess of problems.

And the foreign airspace being owned by a government that is also nuclear-capable probably wouldn't help.

You know, if it turns out Obama "hesistated" (whatever that means, exactly) I don't have a problem with that. I prefer someone who is NOT eager to kill to someone gung-ho to start shooting. Nothing wrong with contemplating alternatives, after all. Would people really want a president who orders such a mission without hesitation? I suppose so - but not me.

I suspect it's more along the lines of Obama being reluctant to give the go order because he was all too aware of the risks and possible consequences and an adviser saying "Mr. President, we really should do this." But hey, I wasn't in the room, so what do I know anyway?

[MKSheppard]

I'm just incredibly amused by the thought of this information leaking last year, and Petraeus leading the assault himself and personally capping OBL.

Do General Officers still get 7.62mm Brownings or have we moved to mighty 9mm in the US Army?

[erik_t]

Everything I've seen/heard has indicated that it was a stall, followed by controlled crash landing and they were unable to get it in the air again and blew it in place.

The prevailing counter-argument is that intentional crashes piss off congresscritters who pay for the things. The Son Tay raid, which was tactically quite successful, used exactly this approach to breaching a confined space via helo.

[weemadando]

Also, don't forget that they were a helo down for the exfil. It could well be that getting prisoners out alive wasn't viable.

That kind of decision could be hard to make if they were having to make the call of whether to try to capture or go for the kill once the assault started.

[Sea Skimmer]

Intentional crash and hull loss became somewhat less likely in my mind once we saw that this wasn't quite an ordinary H-60.

Well it was always going to be a Pave Hawk if it was anything. It does make it less likely... but I'm not so sure these features are all that secret because similar stuff has been shown in wind tunnel tests for years in terms of the rotor cowlings. Its also not really anything the enemy can do anything about except for designing new anti aircraft mines. Work is being done on a fully active control rotor system for the H-60 and H-47 with among other things a dedicated low noise mode... so I think we are only seeing the interim Stealth Hawk anyway.

[erik_t]

Ordinary as in well-known to Other Folks, I meant.

I'm not saying it blows the idea out of the water for me, but it does make it somewhat less likely.

[Mr Bean]

I'm just incredibly amused by the thought of this information leaking last year, and Petraeus leading the assault himself and personally capping OBL.

Do General Officers still get 7.62mm Brownings or have we moved to mighty 9mm in the US Army?

It's 9mm or nothing and the regs are still in place from Vietnam that your not allowed to supply your own side arm in a warzone. I knew a few people who bragged about being able to use 1911 (Like god intended) in .45 ACP as their personal side arm. Those who served directly in Iraq will be better able to tell you as all I have is second hand stories of people who said they did it. However it's forbidden and will result in charges to have a non-standard fire-arm on your person warzone or no.

That said war bends many rules and from what I've heard you'd find all sorts of interesting extras if you inspected your typical on patrol unit in Iraq or A-stan and made them turn out the contents of their tents and transports.

[eion]

Rocket C-130?
Ok, I need to hear details on that one.

Operation Credible Sport

Short Answer: A C-130 was modified by having braking and JATO rockets installed to allow it to land and then take off inside a soccer stadium to allow the rescue of the Iranian Embassy hostages. On testing the braking rockets fired early and caused the plane to slam into the landing area hard. Mission was canceled because Ronny was coming into office.

EDIT: and here's a video of some of the testing I believe. Enjoy the crappy background music.

[MKSheppard]

Link

Pakistan and Osama bin Laden: How the West was conned

The ISI and its covert support of Islamist terrorism must be confronted

By Praveen Swami 10:01PM BST 03 May 2011

In December 1979, at the end of a meeting in which Pakistan decided to embark on a United States-backed, Saudi Arabia-funded secret war that could well have ended in its annihilation by the Soviet Union, the military dictator who ruled Pakistan offered his spymaster a Zen-like maxim. "The water in Afghanistan," Gen Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq told Lt Gen Akhtar Abdul Rehman Khan, the director general of the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), "must boil at the right temperature."

Ever since 9/11, the ISI has been seeking to keep the jihad inside Afghanistan and Pakistan warm, nurturing allies it gave birth to in the years after that meeting, while also joining the West's war against terror – the source of billions of dollars in aid and military patronage.

But Osama bin Laden's killing may mark the point where the water boiled over – destroying Pakistan's relationship with the West, and setting off a chain of events no one can predict.

Irrespective of whether bin Laden was being sheltered by the ISI or merely succeeded in evading its ineffectual counter-terrorism efforts, the challenge for Western policymakers is stark: it has become clear the ISI isn't willing or able to act against jihadists operating from its soil. Even though it is unwise to underestimate the incompetence of south Asia's under-funded, ill-trained police and intelligence services, it is hard to imagine that Pakistan's spies did not investigate just who was building a $1 million fortified complex a few hundred yards from the Pakistan Military Academy at Kakul – a potential target for Pakistani jihadists who have claimed the lives of thousands of soldiers. Bin Laden's neighbours have said the house was protected by closed-circuit cameras; that neighbours were never allowed in; that the rubbish was disposed of by burning – all of which ought to have attracted the attention of even the most indolent spies.

Last year, though, when CNN reported that bin Laden was probably living in Pakistan – the latest in a string of similar reports – Pakistan's foreign ministry insisted the claims were "baseless", and "put out to malign" the country. Back in 2009, Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan's president, even claimed to have it on good authority that bin Laden was dead.

For years, US intelligence officials have complained that Pakistan has been playing a "double game": co-operating with some elements of Western counter-terrorism efforts, while stopping short of decisive action against the jihadist movement. History helps understand just why that game was played.

After Gen Zia-ul-Haq's mysterious death in 1988, Pakistan developed what Hussain Haqqani, now his country's ambassador to the United States, has called "military rule by other means". The scholar Hasan Askari Rizvi has shown that the new system revolved around the army's collegium of commanders, who emerged as the pre-eminent institution of state.

The ISI played a key role in this set-up. Since independence in 1948, Pakistan's covert services have had an unusually important role, faced as the country was with a conventionally superior adversary to its east. In 1947-48, tribal insurgents backed by Pakistani military officers came close to seizing all of Kashmir. Later, in 1965, a more structured version of the enterprise was attempted, using Pakistani military formations. Pakistani intelligence strategists hoped this campaign – which Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, described as an "informal war" – would open up religious and ethnic fissures, leading to the disintegration of their gargantuan adversary.

Pakistan also sought to undermine ethnic-Pashtun nationalism, which Afghanistan used to lay claim to its north-west. It cultivated Islamists exiled by Afghan Gen Muhammad Daoud Khan's secular-nationalist regime, and in July 1975, even financed an attempted coup against Daoud Khan by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the future Mujahideen leader.

Much of this doctrine was learnt in US military schools, where Pakistani officers studied the lessons of guerrilla warfare. But where America sought to prevent such wars, the scholar Stephen Cohen has pointed out, Pakistan studied these "in terms of launching a people's war against India".

Pakistan was thus ideally placed to aid the anti-communist jihad in Afghanistan, and the welter of groups it spawned to fight this campaign ended up becoming allies. In the wake of 9/11, though, it was forced to change course: the former president Musharraf has, in his memoirs, recalled being told that Pakistan would have to side with the United States, or risk being bombed back into the Stone Age.

So, what is it that Pakistan's army now wants? In 2008, when he took charge in what was a de facto coup by Pakistan's generals against their own commander-in-chief, Gen Pervez Kayani, the chief of army staff, was tasked with restoring the institution's political position, which in turn meant restoring order. His efforts brought Pakistan into conflict with America's geopolitical aims.

First, Gen Kayani sought to project influence in Afghanistan, hoping that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban calls itself, would act as an ally against jihadists operating against Pakistan. Figures like the Afghan jihadist leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, the ISI hoped, would temper the Pakistani jihadist coalition, called the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, in return for power. However, the Haqqani network was the most trenchant of the West's adversaries in Afghanistan, and the Tehreek-i-Taliban leader Muhammad Illyas Kashmiri, whom Pakistan fears confronting, is linked to al-Qaeda. Last year, the former Canadian diplomat Chris Alexander asserted that "without Pakistani military support, all signs are the Islamic Emirate's combat units would collapse".

Second, Gen Kayani took a hardline posture on Pakistan's traditional rival, India – a concession to domestic jihadists, who he hoped would again turn their attentions outwards. In 2008, America was reported to have confronted Pakistan's army with evidence that the ISI was involved in an attack on the Indian diplomatic mission in Kabul. Later that year, it is now known from the testimony of the Pakistani-American jihadist David Headley, the ISI facilitated the carnage in Mumbai, providing training and support for the perpetrators.

Key perpetrators of the operation, like its overall commander Sajid Mir and military architect Muhammad Muzammil Bhat, are still at large – and were not even named by Pakistani investigators before Mr Headley's revelations became public.

In recent years, though, the anti-India Lashkar-e-Taiba has also become a threat to the West. Experts like Steven Tankel have shown that its infrastructure has supported jihadist operations in Europe, Afghanistan and even Iraq. Its leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, who is wanted for his role in the Mumbai attack, told a prayer congregation in the city of Lahore on Monday that bin Laden "was a great person who awakened the Muslim world". Not surprisingly, the ISI has been blocking the CIA's efforts to stamp out the Lashkar – leading to the recent showdown over Raymond Davis, a US intelligence official held in Pakistan earlier this year.

Finally, Gen Kayani sought to heal the rupture between Pakistan's army and jihadist allies like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi – one of the legacies of President Musharraf's last years in office.

Musharraf's decision to rein in the jihadists was a response to intense pressures from within the military. Lt Gen Moinuddin Haider, interior minister under Musharraf, was among a group of establishment figures who had
come to realise that Pakistan's patronage of jihadists, though tactically expedient, deterred investors and meant real costs to the country's economy. But while Musharraf cracked down on jihadists, notably by scaling back operations in Jammu and Kashmir, he failed to build an institutional consensus around these ideas – and, as his legitimacy eroded, he proved unable to make a decisive break with the past.

Bin Laden's likely successors – the Egyptian jihad veteran Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's poet-warrior Abu Yahya al-Libi and organisational genius Saif-al-Adel – are all in Pakistan. Gen Kayani has made clear that he has no intention of moving troops into North Waziristan, where Muhammad Illyas Kashmiri's camps are training jihadists to target the West, and have demonstrated no will to go after al-Qaeda elsewhere.

For decades, Western governments have sought, in essence, to bribe Pakistan into a strategic alliance. Gen Kayani has made clear that Pakistan sees things very differently: the West's war against terror, in his view, has mired his country in an existence-threatening crisis, which the army wants out of. That is a choice neither the West, nor Pakistan's citizens, the principal victims of the jihadists on its soil,
can afford.

There are few good options from here: Pakistan and the West are entering a new and profoundly perilous stage in their relationship. Bin Laden's killing might be the end of one phase of the war on terror, but it is profoundly unlikely to be the beginning of peace.

[Edward Yee]

Any plausibility to the idea that drones were kept away from the Abbottabad area (with the possible exception of the RQ-170 "Beast of Kandahar") specifically to lull the compound inhabitants into a sense of security, as I've read in one report, or would its location inside the Islamabad ADIZ make that a moot point?

I'm asking this re: "why not the Osprey?" and why the op wouldn't have been time-sensitive -- after all, the real issue was "is UBL in that building?"

[AMT]

Has anyone posted the whole "waterboarding may have given us Osama's location" stuff I've been hearing on talk radio the last few days?

Linky

A contentious debate arose during the presidency of George W. Bush when it was revealed that American intelligence officials were using "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- waterboarding being the most notorious -- on suspected terrorists in custody. The mission to kill Osama bin Laden has revived the debate ... Bush administration officials are claiming vindication, saying the trail of evidence shows the techniques played a role in obtaining important information. CIA Director Leon Panetta tells the London Telegraph the techniques did yield some of the intelligence that ultimately led to Bin Laden:

In his 2009 Senate confirmation hearings, Mr Panetta, a moderate Democrat and former California congressman, argued that "waterboarding is torture and it's wrong". But he stated candidly last night that discussion about its use will continue. "Whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always gonna be an open question," he said.

U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., says Bin Laden would not have been captured without the use of harsh interrogation techniques like waterboarding (CBS News):

Rep. King, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said (waterboarding) pried the name and identity of Osama bin Laden's courier out of (detainee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- the mastermind of the 9/11 attack. "The initial information we received on who the currier was, the person to lead us to bin Laden, came as the result of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed being waterboarded," Rep. King said. "He appeared on the radar screen as a result of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's statements after he was waterboarded."

A retired CIA officer also says techniques such as waterboarding played a direct role in leading to Bin Laden, although he admits key information was obtained without the use of such methods (The Guardian, London):

"We got beat up for it, but those efforts led to this great day," said Marty Martin, a retired CIA officer who for years led the hunt for Bin Laden, told the Associated Press. Other detainees who appeared to have been useful included Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, who allegedly personally organized the 9/11 operation and who was detained in March 2003. Mohammed was waterboarded repeatedly. Yet Martin also admitted that the information that Mohammed gave which helped identify Kuwaiti happened under "normal investigation techniques".
A report in the New York Times, though, says the effectiveness of harsh interrogation methods remains questionable (New York Times):

But a closer look at prisoner interrogations suggests that the harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden's trusted courier and exposing his hideout. One detainee who apparently was subjected to some tough treatment provided a crucial description of the courier, according to current and former officials briefed on the interrogations. But two prisoners who underwent some of the harshest treatment -- including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times -- repeatedly misled their interrogators about the courier's identity.
White House officials are attempting to downplay the debate, saying it's impossible to know if any useful information came from waterboarding terrorism suspects (AFP):

"The intelligence was acquired over the last nine years or so. And there was some painstaking work done by some very, very dedicated analysts," John Brennan, the top White House counter-terrorism adviser, told CNN. "There was no one single piece of information that was an 'ah-ha' moment that led us to Abbottabad," the Pakistani city where bin Laden was killed in a raid by US special forces. "It was acquired over time. There was a lot of information from a lot of different sources including some people in detention."

Conservative pundits are trying to say this is the reason we got his location, and that we should be ok with it. Some of them even claim we got all our anti-terrorist info (like the shoebomber) came from "enhanced interrogation techniques", and that we got Bin Laden thanks to the bravery of Bush authorizing it.


Any truth to the waterboarding part of it? I haven't seen much except the right wing echo chamber so far.

[Lonestar]

If the courier name was acquired through waterboarding 8 years ago that doesn't speak well to it being an effective turnaround for information.

[Lonestar]

If the courier name was acquired through waterboarding 8 years ago that doesn't speak well to it being an effective turnaround for information.

[Broomstick]

We didn't get the shoebomber through waterboarding or interrogation, we got it because the other passengers on the airplane jumped his ass.

Ditto for the underwear bomber.

What I saw on TV was the CIA director refusing to say where they got the information, and refusing to say either way whether waterboarding or other "enhanced interrogation techniques" played a role. Which, if you think about it, IS the appropriate response from the head of the Secret Spy Stuff agency, who shouldn't be handing out information on procedures. He did say, when asked directly, that waterboarding is one such "enhanced interrogation technique".

I'm skeptical of anything coming from an unnamed "retired official", or any anonymous source. There is no way to verify accuracy in such circumstances.

Anyhow - the ends do not justify the means. Torture is not OK if it gives us the results we want, it's still a bad thing.

[Hawkwings]

If the courier name was acquired through waterboarding 8 years ago that doesn't speak well to it being an effective turnaround for information.

Acquiring information doesn't mean you can act on it. And the process of acting on it does take a while, especially given the rough timelines of the events leading up to this operation that have been released. If we had gotten the information another way at the same time it still would have taken 8 years to lead up to this.

[AMT]

Regardless, this couldn't have been from 8 years ago as the mansion itself wasn't built until 5-6 years ago, IIRC

[mr friendly guy]

I briefly saw on fox news some expert saying we got Khalik Sheikh Mohammed information by enhanced interrogation techniques. Oh and here is the twist. It sort of went like this.

Interrogators - Do you name this guy <insert courier name>

Sheikh Mohammed - No.

The conclusion from the brain trust. The courier must be important because Sheikh Mohammed denied knowing him. So we knew to follow up on that courier. One wonders why you need to torture him for him to get him say NOOOOOO. I mean with this type of "logic", if he says no because he truly doesn't know, we are still going to assume he is lying anyway, so why torture? If he says no because he is lying, we are going to assume he is lying the same as before. Again what is the point of torture if all it took is this um, gut feeling and intuition.

And it seems they knew of these couriers before hand, but not necessarily their significance.

[erik_t]

If the courier name was acquired through waterboarding 8 years ago that doesn't speak well to it being an effective turnaround for information.

Acquiring information doesn't mean you can act on it. And the process of acting on it does take a while, especially given the rough timelines of the events leading up to this operation that have been released. If we had gotten the information another way at the same time it still would have taken 8 years to lead up to this.

That doesn't follow. Breaks can come from the other side - a financial slip-up, a relocation, wandering through an area with cameras - and that can rekindle a cold tip, be it a week or a decade old. Likewise, the march of technology can do the same (a cool stealth UAV than go where no UAV has gone before, higher gain on your SIGINT resources, better datamining or data processing). Either or both may have taken place here.

Running these things down is not some kind of trivial serial process that one can map one-to-one to a different chunk of recent history.

[Crown]

Unless I've missed it (which is quite possible since I'm not obsessing over Osama's death), I'm surprised that India isn't making a song and dance about Pakistan at the moment. Wasn't it the Indian PM who once said; "When is America going to realise that every terrorist bomb that explodes has a 'Made in Pakistan' sticker on it?"