On numerous occasions, Benazir spoke of the influence of the Pakistani intelligence services. She made clear that when she was the elected prime minister, ostensibly the leader of the nation, she had had little control over intelligence organizations or the military. A fervent believer in the need to combat Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, she bemoaned the close relationships among the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s intelligence community. She felt they were “in cahoots” in Afghanistan, working against American and Western interests, and she recognized that her own life might be threatened because of her efforts to address this problem….
On more than one occasion she told me she was virtually certain that Osama bin Laden was not living in a cave in the mountainous region of Afghanistan or Pakistan. “He’s living comfortably somewhere in Pakistan,” she would say. “He’s being supported and protected by Pakistani intelligence. You can bet on it.”
October 2007- she was killed after a political rally and speech to a large throng of supporters. Many of her friends, myself included, believe that the military government that ran Pakistan at the time failed to provide her with the necessary security. Whether this failure was on purpose or from neglect, the result was the loss of the one Pakistani who offered the best hope for secular, progressive leadership in a nation and region that desperately need it.
“If we had shielded Osama bin Laden, why would we have killed and arrested so many al-Qaeda leaders?” he asked with discernible indignation, according to parliamentarians. “Would we have hidden such a large target in such an exposed area? Without any guards or escape route? Our job is safeguarding the country.” The CIA, Gen. Pasha said, did not share intelligence with the ISI in the lead up to the raid.
Hide in the Open-First lesson in terrorism and espionage.
Exactly the ground for the present argument .
..”We are at a point in our history,” he said, according to two parliamentarians, “where we have to decide whether to stand up to America now or have [following] generations come to deride us.” …
Present imbroglio brought about by ISI.
Lieut. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the ISI chief, conceded that Osama bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan had been an “intelligence failure” and that he was prepared to step down and submit himself to any scrutiny, parliamentarians from both government and opposition parties told TIME on condition of anonymity. Gen. Pasha was speaking at a rare, closed-door briefing to Pakistan’s parliament where the lawmakers swore an oath not to reveal details discussed.
Intelligence Collaboration is the word.
“I present myself to the Prime Minister for any punishment and am willing to appear before any commission personally
Pasha was the third military leader to speak before the lawmakers, and the only one not in uniform. At the start of his speech, the general, though he conceded intelligence failure, passionately defended the ISI. He argued that the U.S., U.K. and India did not ridicule their intelligence agencies after 9/11, the 2005 London subway bombings and the 2008 Mumbai massacre. In those countries, retorted Senator Pervez Rashid of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif‘s opposition party, there is no history of military takeovers, a not unsubtle hint to the primacy of the armed forces in Pakistani politics. “There was no response from Pasha,” says a parliamentarian.
In that vein, Pakistan’s chief spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, will not allow the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct operations in Pakistan without the full knowledge of the ISI, General Pasha said.
The spy chief did the talking. General Kayani attended the session, along with the heads of the air force and the navy, but did not speak, apparently to be spared the humiliation. Senior military officials, considered to be above civilian law and a power unto themselves, rarely appear before Parliament, or even its defense committees.
General Pasha told Parliament he had a “shouting match” with the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, over C.I.A. activities in Pakistan when they met recently in Washington, several lawmakers who attended the session said.
Do you mean to say that you do not keep tabs on CIA in Pakistan?
General Pasha then explained that Pakistan should be given credit for dismantling Al Qaeda even before the United States killed Bin Laden, according to the accounts from lawmakers after the session.
On your own, with out pressure from the US?
In a direct assault on statements by American officials that the ISI supports jihadist militant groups, including the Haqqani network in North Waziristan, General Pasha said there was no such policy. “We have nothing to do with the Haqqani network,” he was quoted as saying.
So, you have been supporting other terrorist networks.?
For the first time, according to one lawmaker, Air Marshal Hassan acknowledged that Pakistan allowed the United States to fly the drones out of Shamsi Air Base in Baluchistan.
The Plan was in the offing for many years, even when Obama was a Senator.
Read On.
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)…..
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.”
A U.S. officials told FoxNews said that the records currently in the hands of the United States contains the ideas and plot terror operations.
…
From behind the walls of his hiding, bin Laden continues to communicate with the branches of Al Qaeda, particularly Yemen. And although not yet completed sufficient evidence, he allegedly was behind the terror business day of Christmas 2009 at the Detroit Airport, USA.
“Do not limit the attack to the City of New York,” said Osama in writing on the notes.Any other city in the journal is Los Angeles, or another small town. ”Spread the target.”
Osama also stressed to pengikutinya how many Americans who have become victims, in order to rid the country of the Arab world. He said, a small attack would not be enough. To his followers, he calls the thousands – the number of victims is not far different from the tragedy of 11 September 2009 terror attacks.
Meanwhile, as the site loaded CNN, bin Laden is known not only send messages on its network, the evidence also shows that he received a response to his message was.
Osama’s diary also refers to the important dates in the U.S. calendar: July 4 U.S. Independence Day, Christmas, and 10-year anniversary 9 / 11.
Related.
He pointed the network in certain directions. One of his missives to his supporters was to stop focusing on the big cities, particularly New York, and instead target Los Angeles and other smaller cities.The missives were sent via plug-in computer storage devices called flash drives. The devices were ferried to Osama’s compound by couriers, a process that is slow but difficult to track.
Osama’s diary included significant dates that he preferred for attacking American targets, including the Fourth of July and the upcoming 10th anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks.
He also urged his followers not to focus only on planes but to target trains too – an instruction that chimes with last week’s warning from the US authorities alerting people to be vigilant on trains, though they were not aware of any specific plot.
Osama also schemed about ways to sow political dissent in Washington and play political figures against one another, officials said.
Meanwhile, US Attorney-General Eric Holder has said the raid on Osama’s lair was “not an assassination”, the BBC reported.
Mr Holder told the broadcaster that the operation was a “kill or capture mission” and Osama would have been captured if he had surrendered.
He said the safety of the US special forces troops who carried out the operation was priority.
“If the possibility had existed, if there was the possibility of a feasible surrender, that would have occurred,” Mr Holder said. “But … the protection of the force that went into that compound, was I think uppermost in our minds.” Agencies
US senator describes ‘gruesome’ Osama photos
A Republican who sits on the United States Senate Armed Services Committee viewed the death photographs of Osama bin Ladenon Wednesday and said the pictures – some gruesome – leave no doubt the Al Qaeda leader is dead.”Absolutely no question about it … That was him. He’s gone. He’s history,” Mr James Inhofe said on CNN.
Mr Inhofe said he saw 15 photos – nine taken at the scene of the May 2 raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan; three from the USS Carl Vinson, where Osama’s body was prepared for burial at sea; and three older photos to compare for positive identification.
Mr Inhofe described some photos that showed brain matter protruding from an eye socket. But the senator, a proponent of releasing the pictures, said he has not changed his mind after viewing them.
He said he thinks at least two photos from the USS Vinson showing the body being cleaned should be released because they depict an easily identifiable Osama. Reuters
As Osama Bin Laden spent years on the run, it appears he kept his family close to him.
Although separated and divorced from two wives, three others were living with him in the Abbotabad compound where he died.
Amal al-Sadah was reportedly shot in the leg as she rushed at US special forces who stormed her bedroom. Pakistani authorities are now holding Amal al-Sadah, as well as Bin Laden’s two other wives, Khairiah Sabar, and Siham Sabar, and a number of their children.
Bin Laden’s fourth son, Omar, has repeatedly distanced himself from his father’s ideology and married a British woman in 2006.
But two of Bin Laden’s other sons, Saad and Hamza, are believed to be following in their father’s footsteps as al-Qaeda operatives. Both their whereabouts are unknown.
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