Behind the hunt for bin Laden
There are some things stated as fact in here that I had not seen elsewhere.
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.
Pakistanis working for the CIA first identified the courier's car.
On a moonless night eight months later, 79 American commandos in four helicopters descended on the compound, the officials said.
Seventy-nine people is new to me.
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.
The fact that the guys who were water boarded (KSM and AFaL) denied everything shows the ineffectiveness of water boarding.
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.
People on the ground. And where were those people in 2002, 2003, and 2004? Iraq. There can be no question that Iraq delayed finding bin Laden.
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.
I recall that during the Clinton administration people would know something was up because the White House would order lots of Dominoes pizza. Give Obama credit for not putting any money in Herman Cain Tom Monaghan's pocket.
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.
It was not Osama who used a woman as a shield.
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.
The deathers still want to see his body, of course.
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.
Computer hard drives? There have to be a few thousand AQ operatives around the world who are now experiencing rectal discomfort as they attempt to pass a brick. ObL was not the sort of uber-genius who could keep all the details of a world wide network in his head. These drives have to be full of names, addresses, skill sets, and so on. The round-ups will likely be done quietly but they have probably already started.Updated by blue aardvark at Tue May 03, 2011 at 08:44 AM MST
Per CNN - 10 hard drives, 5 computers, 100 storage devices such as disks and thumb drives. http://www.cnn.com/...
Please oh please oh please let at least one of the disks be bin Laden's personal porn collection. Let's take down the "spiritual leader" myth today.