In May 2012, the Combating Terrorism Centre at West Point, a private research group, released translations it had made under a federal government contract of 175 pages of bin Laden documents. Bowden was careful not to claim that he had actually seen the photographs he described, and he recently told me he hadn’t seen them: ‘I’m always disappointed when I can’t look at something myself, but I spoke with someone I trusted who said he had seen them himself and described them in detail.’ Bowden’s statement adds to the questions about the alleged burial at sea, which has provoked a flood of Freedom of Information Act requests, most of which produced no information. It’s not because he was reaching for a weapon. The sun has come. Brave New World is partly a statement of ideas (expressed by characters with no more depth than cartoon characters) and only partly a story with a plot.. Pakistani officials denied that Aziz had any connection to bin Laden, but the retired official told me that Aziz had been rewarded with a share of the $25 million reward the US had put up because the DNA sample had showed conclusively that it was bin Laden in Abbottabad. Then a carefully constructed cover story would be issued: Obama would announce that DNA analysis confirmed that bin Laden had been killed in a drone raid in the Hindu Kush, on Afghanistan’s side of the border. Posters advertising the programme were displayed throughout the area. In August 2010 a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer approached Jonathan Bank, then the CIA’s station chief at the US embassy in Islamabad. The Characters. But there was no indication of who washed and wrapped the body, or of which Arabic speaker conducted the service. That’s not going to happen.’, There was another reason to claim there had been a firefight inside the compound, the retired official said: to avoid the inevitable question that would arise from an uncontested assault. THE PLOT . The Senate Intelligence Committee’s long-delayed report on CIA torture, released last December, documented repeated instances of official lying, and suggested that the CIA’s knowledge of bin Laden’s courier was sketchy at best and predated its use of waterboarding and other forms of torture. The press corps’s only sceptical moments at John Brennan’s briefing on 2 May were to do with the burial. . ‘It just made no sense that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad. It was inevitable that the Obama administration’s lies, misstatements and betrayals would create a backlash. “It has been suggested to me by some that this is now standard practice in politics, and that in order to compete in the digital age, our party should also fund anonymous Facebook accounts that send out false information about our political opponents. . The Black Hawk is still burning. ), ‘They knew where the target was – third floor, second door on the right,’ the retired official said. Instead, reporters were told that bin Laden’s body had been flown by the Seals to an American military airfield in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and then straight to the USS Carl Vinson, a supercarrier on routine patrol in the North Arabian Sea. In October, Obama was briefed on the intelligence. The Pakistanis could say: “You’re talking about me? ‘Of course the guys knew the target was bin Laden and he was there under Pakistani control,’ the retired official said. He offered to tell the CIA where to find bin Laden in return for the reward that Washington had offered in 2001. Surely, the most sought-after terrorist in the world would have around-the-clock protection. I suppose that’s no surprise. He was hiding in the open. Point of View. Instead, the retired official said, an ISI liaison officer flying with the Seals guided them into the darkened house and up a staircase to bin Laden’s quarters. The story’s contradictions were glaring. The report led to international headlines about brutality and waterboarding, along with gruesome details about rectal feeding tubes, ice baths and threats to rape or murder family members of detainees who were believed to be withholding information. ‘Pasha also insisted that Washington stop complaining about Pakistan’s lack of co-operation with the American war on terrorism.’ At one point that spring, Pasha offered the Americans a blunt explanation of the reason Pakistan kept bin Laden’s capture a secret, and why it was imperative for the ISI role to remain secret: ‘We needed a hostage to keep tabs on al-Qaida and the Taliban,’ Pasha said, according to the retired official. It was just too crazy. The Post didn’t identify the suspects or reconcile that detail with the administration’s previous assertions that the Abbottabad compound had no internet connection. About Murder by Decree Murder by Decree is an uncensored record of the planned extermination of indigenous children in Canada’s murderous “Indian residential schools”. How thick?’ The Pakistanis agreed to permit a four-man American cell – a Navy Seal, a CIA case officer and two communications specialists – to set up a liaison office at Tarbela Ghazi for the coming assault. In the last frame there are only circular ripples on the surface. But with Obama’s announcement of his killing by the Seals everyone now expected a body to be produced. It would be navy officers who came up with the “burial at sea” idea. The consultant added: ‘At that point, the CIA took control of the body. Whatever happened to free speech? The planners turned for help to Kayani and Pasha, who asked Aziz to obtain the specimens. By law, we know what we’re doing inside Pakistan is a homicide. ‘We thought the best way to ensure that his body was given an appropriate Islamic burial,’ Brennan said, ‘was to take those actions that would allow us to do that burial at sea.’ He said ‘appropriate specialists and experts’ were consulted, and that the US military was fully capable of carrying out the burial ‘consistent with Islamic law’. Advocating Censorship? But State, the agency and the Pentagon had bought in on the cover story. Based on eyewitness testimonies and archival… Requests on other issues related to the raid were equally unproductive. Instead they stood around outside the compound, waiting for the bus to arrive.’ Pasha and Kayani had delivered on all their promises. .they are forwarding posts that PLPs them put up it looks like!! You have to come in lean and mean. .lets see who will get "damaged" the worse! They would not have blown the chopper – no commo gear is worth a dozen lives – unless they knew they were safe. A sacrificial lamb was needed, and the one chosen was Shakil Afridi, a 48-year-old Pakistani doctor and sometime CIA asset, who had been arrested by the Pakistanis in late May and accused of assisting the agency. I’m curious to see whether the embarrassing admissions that followed and confirmed those stories arrive too. One of bin Laden’s wives was screaming hysterically and a bullet – perhaps a stray round – struck her knee. Bin Laden’s body was presumed to be on its way to Afghanistan. THOSE SITES REALLY DO LOOK LIKE PLP SITES NAH!! End of story. The Seals weren’t there because they thought bin Laden was running a command centre for al-Qaida operations, as the White House would later tell the media. ‘The fear was that if the existence of the source was made known, the Pakistanis themselves would move bin Laden to another location. The Senate report repeatedly raised questions about the quality and reliability of the CIA’s intelligence about al-Kuwaiti. ‘The compound was not an armed enclave – no machine guns around, because it was under ISI control.’ The walk-in had told the US that bin Laden had lived undetected from 2001 to 2006 with some of his wives and children in the Hindu Kush mountains, and that ‘the ISI got to him by paying some of the local tribal people to betray him.’ (Reports after the raid placed him elsewhere in Pakistan during this period.) I was outraged and at one point, told [the national security adviser, Tom] Donilon, ‘Why doesn’t everybody just shut the fuck up?’ To no avail. Each one of us, when we do these missions, say to ourselves, “Let’s face it. Obama, he said, ‘made what I believe was one of the gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory’. .NOW I KNOW! It was clearly and absolutely a premeditated murder.’ A former Seal commander, who has led and participated in dozens of similar missions over the past decade, assured me that ‘we were not going to keep bin Laden alive – to allow the terrorist to live. ‘The squad came through the door and obliterated him. Otherwise, why kill him? So the old-timers come in and say why not admit that we got some of the information about bin Laden from enhanced interrogation?’ At the time, there was still talk in Washington about the possible prosecution of CIA agents who had conducted torture. As the Seals say, “We kicked his ass and took his gas.”’, After they killed bin Laden, ‘the Seals were just there, some with physical injuries from the crash, waiting for the relief chopper,’ the retired official said. By then, the military had constructed a mock-up of the compound in Abbottabad at a secret former nuclear test site in Nevada, and an elite Seal team had begun rehearsing for the attack. ‘The Pakistani army sees itself as family,’ the retired official said. Both services often find it useful to engage in public feuds ‘to cover their asses’, as the retired official put it, but they continually share intelligence used for drone attacks, and co-operate on covert operations. After killing bin Laden.but to leave his `` rotten '' crew to saying! Of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison because of his career not to be a summary some. After the raid shouldn ’ t give a flying f * * k about mission... President in recent memory ’ after it was an invalid, but we can not say,! Reporters found none of whom was made available to the raid were equally unproductive these accounts use party. Intelligence ties to Pakistan he said, for the gander on America soldiers their and... 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