Osama bin Laden Left the Tribal Lands in 2003
All those drones we’ve been dropping on the tribal lands of Pakistan?
Well, they must have come close to hitting OBL once before–because a drone in Waziristan apparently killed one of OBL’s daughters.
Amongst those left behind by the evacuating Navy Seals were Osama’s three wives, two of them highly educated Saudis, his elder son and four children of a daughter who was killed in a drone strike in Waziristan, the officials said.
They also included Osama’s Abbottabad-born five-year-old son and 22-year-old daughter, the officials added.
But according to this story–relying on the account of the youngest of the three wives reported to have been arrested from the compound in Abbottabad, Amal–OBL moved out of the tribal lands some time in 2003.
Amal, according to officials familiar with [Pakistani] investigations, said that before moving to his sprawling compound in Bilal Town, Abbottabad, towards the end of 2005, Osama bin Laden had lived with his family in Chak Shah Mohammad Khan, a village in the nearby district of Haripur, for nearly two and a half years.
Chak Shah Mohammad, situated on the highway to Abbottabad, is two kilometres to the southeast of Haripur town.
In retrospect that meant, one of the officials observed, Osama had left the country’s tribal region sometime in 2003 to live in a settled area.
Granted, given these Reuters pictures, he appears to have lived in a cave-like dwelling. But he appears to have left the tribal lands back in 2003, around the time Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got captured and Abu Faraj al-Libi moved to Abbottabad for a year.
Tora Bora is right on the Afghan-Pakistan border. It’s very possible bin Laden spent from Dec. 2001 to 2003 in Waziristan, before moving to Chak Shah Mohammad until 2005, when he re-located to Abbottabad.
All in Pakistan.
One of the commentors on the TV machine said that Abbottabad is just straight down the road from Tora Bora.
Bob in AZ
From the Department of You Can’t Make This Up: Reagan Made Killing Bin Laden Possible
The comments are priceless…
a commenter on the Stephanie Miller show had a hysterical hissy fit insisting JFK deserved all the praise & glory, ’cause he started the Seals…
*pounding head on keyboard*
and so where was our very expensive,
very invasive of privacy (soldiers’ phone conversations with their wives/husbands),
“sigint” macho muchachos?
we, the people, paid billions of our tax dollars;
tolerated the likelihood of having our phone conversations overheard;
but osama bin laden, villian #1 at the time, just kept on skating.
aren’t these american bureaucracies (fbi, cia, nsa) the same bureaucracys that allowed the saudi pseudo- pilots
to learn their “tradecraft” regarding bombing the wtc and the pentagon?
Admittedly, I don’t know how much of all this reporting to believe.
But the long time spans of bin Laden outside of the tribal areas, and in Abbottabad, strike me as perilous news for two groups of people:
1. the neocons
2. the Pakistani government (ISI and military and political)
The neocons are trying to claim that the news of couriers is somehow so Top Secret they had to torture it out, which is dumb on the face of it.
Obviously, bin Laden was not using cell phones.
Unless he was using carrier pidgeons or balloons, he had to be using couriers.
This could have been deduced quite easily (many EW commenters probably did it in under an hour).
Last week’s news that ‘intel about the presence of couriers’ was elicited through torture seems roughly like the neocons announcing that, after torturing some guy from Iowa, they discovered that Americans receive mail communications stamped with postage, delivered by a postal clerk.
Either I am really missing something, or this is idiocy.
What on earth did they think bin Laden was using for his messages? Purple dinosaurs? Pink flamingos?
Green crepe paper?
Napkins?
Toiletries?
But now it gets worse: how can the neocons possibly explain the shameful fact that bin Laden was living **for at least three years of their watch** a short hike from the Pakistani version of West Point? His kids (and grandkids?) were eating sweets from the corner store, and nobody had any idea… (break out the violins for the sweet serenade by Dick Cheney…)
Unbelievable.
I predict that some of the kerfuffle about What the Pakistanis Really Knew All Along will be motivated in part by a heated effort on the part of the neocons to shed all the blame on the Pakistanis.
I expect the Crazytrain to pick up a full head of steam this coming week, primarily because the exposed reality simply creates such deeply troubling questions about both the Pakistanis AND ALSO about the Bush Administration and the neocons.
I would add another group to whom after more of the story unfolds it will be perilous news. The intelligence-military information chain involved in determining the location of al Quaeda operatives and setting targets for drone strikes. The “I don’t care about bin Laden” attitude seems to have crept down from the top once the Iraq War started and punitive action instead of information became the object of the intelligence community both in Guantanamo and in the targeting of drones strikes.
The ISI through Pakistani government spokespersons has adopted the line that they captured 42 top-level al Quaeda operatives and delivered them to the US who sent them to black sites and Guantanamo. The silent implication that the US interrogation should have led the US quicker to Osama bin Laden. But I suspect that there are several politically competing elements in the Pakistani ISI and military. I also suspect that of the US intelligence community and military despite the public show of unity.
Crazytrain:
In the ‘looking glass’ hypothesis – where OBL is hermetically sealed within a secret allied surveillance program like a Santa Claus inside a snow-globe – ‘torture’ or the EIT program would actually be a method of laundering the looking glass-derived intelligence into the record.
Here’s how it might work.
In theory, since all the actors and their plans are already known through the surveillance program – the captors already ‘know’ what the ‘future’ detainees know.
So, for instance, the captors already know in detail what Ghul knows about the planned election attack of 2004. In his case, they capture him at the time and place of their choosing and slide him a plate of cupcakes…just out of reach of his shackled fingers – and he sings like a canary and confesses, telling everything he knows, just like the ‘record’ shows.
Otoh, when someone like KSM refuses to acknowledge and confess to the ‘known’ importance of Al-Kuwati, for instance, then he’s a ‘toughened resistor’ – to use a favorite phrase from Jodi of TNH days – and he gets marched right up the EIT ladder – until he ‘complies.’
Even if the detainee ‘makes up stories’ under harsh interrogation – it doesn’t matter. The captors already know what he knows, and therefore know when he’s lying, too.
So, what accumulates is the ‘record’ of the secret surveillance – and a pile of ‘confessions’ that match, all laundered through the “look what you made me do!” punishment and compliance paradigm.
If true, it could be a darkly brilliant plan of attack…but fraught with the potential for abuse of all kinds…
…like deceitfully and opportunistically invading an uninvolved but oil-rich ‘axis of evil’ country, amongst other things.
However, we should hold open the possibility that the EIT Program really was constructed with, and intended to have, a focus on ‘compliance’ and not simply the gleeful infliction of pain.
But, it’s all only hypothetical…
A question I’ve been mulling for a while now is whether the Cheney faction, through Tommy Franks, let bin Laden go from Tora Bora on purpose.
At the time, they were planning the Iraq invasion and were ready to ramp up the PR machine stressing that we needed to invade Iraq in order to stop Saddam from giving bin Laden nukes. What their actual reasons are will have to be dug out by historians. Or criminal investigators. But nukes were what drove widespread public acceptance of invading Iraq.
If bin Laden was dead, that argument would have far less traction. In fact, if bin Laden had been killed or captured at Tora Bora, the whole Global War on Terrorism would have probably sputtered badly for lack of the necessary fear on the part of so many Americans, left and right. Bin Laden attacked us; we tracked him down and killed him. Lesson: Don’t screw with America and we all go home.
And that simply wasn’t allowable for the Cheney crowd. The fear component was necessary to propel the draconian Patriot Act expansions, illegal surveillance, extraordinary renditions, and other acts Cheney was fixated on. With bin Laden dead, too many uncomfortable questions would have been asked, including why it was then necessary to go into Iraq. It’s entirely possible that many of those on the left who were enthusiastic supporters of invading Iraq would have had serious second thoughts, seriously damaging the bipartisan support for what was obviously an illegal war. Same with our “partners,” especially Great Britain, where it’s likely public opinion would have gotten even more skeptical than it already was.
There’s also the other fact, that at first glance doesn’t seem to mesh with the above, but which I think also had a bearing on it, and that’s that Bush’s national security apparatus, especially Rice who Bush depended on for his foreign policy knowledge (having absolutely none of his own), still didn’t assign much value to preventing terrorism. They were far more fixated on the Great Game, and while Russia had been back-burnered by 9/11, I think it was still very much on Rice’s radar screen. After all, Iraq had been a long-time USSR/Russian client state. I’m convinced that Rice (who really wasn’t trusted enough to be one of the Cheney putsch), while seemingly brilliant, is extremely limited in her ability to see the big picture, and was never, even after 9/11, totally engaged in anti-terrorism. I don’t think she understood it, and from her public comments since leaving the Bush Administration, she does not understand it yet.
So with two factions in Bush Land uninterested for different reasons in eliminating bin Laden, and, in fact, since at least one faction believed he was of much more use to their ultimate goals alive than dead I don’t think their search for him was ever very serious. Franks’ inexplicable actions concerning Tora Bora make no sense otherwise.
John Kerry on Face the Nation:
“We should shut
the fuckup”http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/osamatape2.html
Pinocchio News.
I do not know if you watched the “Last Word” with Lawrence O’Donnell or part of “Rachel Maddow Show”, but on the shows they talked with Condi Rice and it was so plane that she was lying. YET she is on most of the Sunday’s Talking Head shows! That is totally showing how lacking of true JOURNALISM there is in the TV media we have!!!!!
There are surely question about why OBL wasn’t found earlier, BUT this is not time to bring out the Neocon’s on the shows!
I think the real question is why so much of the tax dollars were wasted??? And, why we lost so many men & women on both sideWs for 1 person!!!!
The problem may be Dan Rather when he was in the hills with OBL during the Russian involvement in Afghanistan.
Or, Bush, Cheney, and the other Neocons were really trying to bankrupt this country so we do become a true Feudel Class society, based on the millitary complex.
If everybody is scrambling to claim credit, or assign credit to anybody but Prez O, it can only tell us that everybody realizes there is a big pile of credit to be divvied up. Andrew Card accuses Obama of “pounding his chest”, in other words the attempt by the Bush regime to divert credit away is failing.
Low-information voters are deaf to tortured (heh) logic, regardless of which group is pushing it. “Obama got Osama” is what they will remember.
I personally don’t care all that much, I quit caring about 9/11 and terrorism years ago, I just want the wars stopped. If assassinating ObL gets out of our current Quagmires one day sooner, it was worth it. His life was worth no more and no less than any collateral damage from a drone attack.
that was my fave..Andy go get the cheeseburgers Card,after STOPPING an aircrfat carrier for cooocooBananas to fake a landing on with his ballz pulled up to his navel
Why does this post link to the one below it?
i left you a final comment on talking heads thread
Yeah, just now saw it, thanks! :)
Has anyone given a thought to the treatment of the women and children handed over to the Pakistanis? Our concern for women and children to the fore, again.
We should never allow the three widows of OBL to be given to any USA agency. Nor any of his children. Our track record of treatment to those we feel could give us any information we want, is very poor at best. Leave these women alone.
Well, unfortunately we have the example of Siddiqqi(?) to worry about. I’m thinking about that Pakistani woman a Ph.D., I think, who was arrested in Pakistan, held for interrogation, her children were detained, and some U.S. court within this year(?) convicted her of terrorism because she tried to defend herself from some agent with a gun. I’m afraid I have all these details somewhat mangled, but Pakistan’s ISI doesn’t exactly have clean hands when it comes to people they take into custody.
Bob in AZ
If the bin Laden Affair proved one thing, it’s this: As long as you don’t have a cell phone, a landline or an internet connection, you can foil the biggest and most sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus in human history for over a decade.
I think that may be the most believable accounting of OBL’s assassination that I’ve read to date.
The issue of the helicopter not being able to hop a wall or take off due to unfavorable air conditions astonishes me. WTF? Calculating air density is basic aerodynamics. Perhaps they thought that the utterly righteous awesomeness of their mission would make the air do their bidding.