What Do We Really Know About Osama Bin Laden’s Death?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In other words, is it possible that elements in the Pakistani state (read: ISI cells / divisions) and some personnel knew that Bin Laden was in Pakistan? Almost certainly yes.
Is it probable that it was known widely by the governing apparatus as a sort of defacto knowledge discussed at say, the cabinel level? I'd say that's unlikely.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/10/mark-bowden-bin-laden...
1) There are super secret helicopters that allowed the US Seals to fly over Pakistan to Abbotabad (which is nearer to India than to Afghanistan) without the Pakistani military which is always paranoid about Indian aircraft/drones knowing about it.
2) Despite one of the Helicopters CRASHING & BURNING and some guy Tweeting about it, there was no police, no military response in Abbotabad, a Garrison City where you literally cannot throw a rock and not hit a Military person
3) The US Seals faced no resistance while entering the compound, and OBL had no guards on the perimeter
4) No single image of OBL's body is in the public domain
5) the Seals flew out to Abbotabad, were on the scene for an hour, flew back (about ~3 hours) of elapsed time - never once were the Pakistani's any wiser? No military, no police no official response?
These are only some of the major flaws but if you think about this for sometime the whole thing totally strains belief.
Maybe Seymor Hersh's tale is not the truth but the official version is certainly pure fantasy.
Benazir Bhutto said, a month before she was assassinated, that Osama Bin Laden was killed in 2001 by Omar Sheikh:
Of course pakistan knew perfectly well.
No third-party corroboration. No photos. Nothing but a story.
That is supremely ridiculous.
If OBL is in fact alive he should show up holding today's newspaper any day now in a new video showing how incompetent the USA really is. Also what good does it do to fake his death? We certainly aren't winning over there and everyone knows it, as Obama just committed to extending our stay in Afghanistan. Faking OBL's death makes no sense if he can just show up on YouTube the next month alive and discredit everything the government told us.
How much angrier can we make people?
And, we have done this, presumably, because of OBL. After killing him, we can tell detailed stories about how the raid was performed, describe where he was shot, etc., but we just can't actually show evidence?
Sorry. Makes no sense.
As to why he doesn't show up, some believe he was already dead, which is plausible. Bhutto said as much years ago, before her passing.
If he had actually died much earlier, then the charade would have to end at some point, right? There would need to be closure.
3. I can absolutely believe that. Guards attract attention and are a massive risk in terms of extra low level people having information that they may accidentally leak. He was the most wanted man in the world, how would guards have helped? He was facing nation states not gangs. He survived all those years because he kept a low profile with a tiny number of people knowing his location.
4. Why would it be released? It isn't like anyone is claiming he is still alive.
5. See 1. But also bear in mind that many of the options available to Pakistan would have had severe repercussions. If they knew (or heavily suspected) it was a US raid then they were hardly going to shoot it down. It could have taken a decent amount of time just to run down the "are you sure this isn't us?" line, proving a negative takes time. Once the information necessary to make a decision was received it is entirely possible someone senior made the deliberate call to be deescalatory and deal with the situation diplomatically - which is arguably the right call. As for the police why would they interfere in what is clearly (someone's) military operation, something which is likely to be a career or life ending move.
You need to account for human nature, military bureaucracy and never attributing to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
So, game it out: if the mission fails, and the SEALs are stranded in Abbotabad, then what happens? Probably nothing, other than some embarrassment for the administration. The SEALs could probably fly back commercial if they had to.
This isn't a midnight raid into North Korea we're talking about.
Your suggestion that all the radar was merely pointed in the wrong direction is ridiculous.
"You need to account for human nature, military bureaucracy and never attributing to malice what can be explained by incompetence"
But this is specifically addressed in the article. The Pakistanis frequently explain inconvenient facts as incompetence.
On the radar point I've love you to explain why it is ridiculous. Ground based radar is sited in a way to reduce the blindspots created by terrain features. Given Pakistan has viewed Afghanistan as a client state essentially since the Soviet pullout, yet is terrified of India it is surely credible that detecting low flying aircraft coming from Afghanistan is not top of the priority list when it comes to siting their radar?
I like that your conspiracy theory involves a government secretly being much more competent than it claims to be.
Radar is arranged to create overlapping coverage and handle planes flying weird courses (and switching to secondary targets and flying home). It's possible the US knows Pakistans air defence grid so well that it could pull this off but it wouldn't be because their radar is pointed at India.
Governments claim incompetence to cover up stuff all the time. "We lost those records." Suggesting that the Pakistani government is incapable of doing this is silly.
I'm claiming that Bin Laden may still be alive.
Or, quite the opposite, he might have been killed long time ago.
Without body, Obama's claims about Navy Seals killing Osama Bin Laden in 2011 are unsubstantiated.
What the 9/11 attack did is damage the core of Western principles and send the entire population of US into state of paranoia. The massive overreaction of US killed orders of magnitude more people than died in the attack and it is us, not terrorists, who are danger to our own freedoms.
But when you go in later we need proof that it's the right person you've caught. Not just for their sake, but for ours.
Rule of law protects me, so I have in interest in offering it to others at any opportunity even if they're scum and don't "deserve" it.
> ...bin Laden’s burial at sea
(carried out in accordance with "Islamic custom"!)
But go ahead, someone correct me, with some obscure technicality about the ways of Islam and The Sea. What do I know, land lubber that I am?
We're talking only whole bodies, dunked in the drink.
I'm going to ball park it at less than 10%, probably dialing in at perhaps 1%, or at most 2%.
Burial at sea is explicitly within Islamic practice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burial_at_sea#Islam).
It's not common, but guidelines exist. The Arabs were not without their own traders and explorers.
The idea that there has to be some black and white distinction between the US cooperating with Pakistani authorities to enter the country and kill him vs the idea that they had no knowledge at all I think is probably not accurate. It sounds possible that US authorities alerted Pakistani authorities that they were going to be conducting a raid and Pakistan could comply or face much bigger problems. Since they didn't want to be portrayed internationally as being complicit in housing a well known terrorist, they ignored the radar signatures of the helicopters just long enough for the raid to happen.
It's too bad they didn't bring the body back to the US. I wouldn't consider Bin Laden to be a Muslim and therefore not deserving of a proper Muslim burial. I see no reason they should have disposed of him and prevented some sort of public verification.
They did not want the body to become a shrine to those who followed the ideology of Bin Laden, and they similarly did not want the picture(s) of his body to be iconography for that ideology. I know a lot of people disagree, but I can see very valid reasoning behind how they disposed of his body.
The US administration had no good reason to capture Bin Laden, because Bin Laden's trial would have been very messy for the US administration.
You mean the Al-Masjid an-Nabawi and the so called Green Dome under which Mohammed is buried? An area that has become a standard stop as the second holiest place in Islam in the muslim pilgrimage?
I do agree with you, that's the Saudi position and the green dome is an exception (which may one day end up stopping to be an exception), but so far they've spared it despite various calls to destroy it in the past, and rather have expanded the site in a massive way (not the tomb, but the mosque around it, which is visited becomes of veneration of Mohamed and visits to the tomb). If you had named any other person you'd have been right, but so far Mohamed seems to be an exception to the rule.
Regardless I don't think it mattered much. Take the holy site in Shia islam, the shrine of Husain ibn Ali for example, was first believed to have been marked with a berry tree. A few years later, a mosque was built, which roughly 100 years later was demolished and the berry tree cut down. People still kept visiting guided (it is said), by the traces of the berry tree. The caliph then ordered the tree to be cut out from the root to stop people from visiting. A few decades later a new mosque was built, which a few decades later still was destroyed and the land ordered to be ploughed (including the grave). Stuff like this went on for centuries, with new mosques being built and destroyed for political or religious reasons. I'm doubtless as to whether OBL's burial sight would've become a place of visitation and propaganda, it'd be inevitable to have created some following even if it was merely marked by GPS and barely any structure could be found at the sight because any structures would get removed. Burial at sea is the exception.
He wasn't a Scotsman, either.
As for cooperation: it's extremely plausible for anyone who is aware of where bin Laden was hiding to choose to do absolutely nothing (and to try to refrain those who aren't aware of that fact to stay the hell away until the dust settles). It's reasonable to infer that various people in the military figured out that the US was going after bin Laden sometime during the raid and decided to pretend nothing was going on. Again, given what's been known about Pakistan's cooperation with terrorists in the past, I'd be more surprised if the US was open to even limited people in Pakistan about what it was about to do--in a choice between "piss off Pakistan" versus "risk bin Laden getting away," the former would be my personal vote and probably those of most US politicians.
Ultimately, that's the problem I have with Hersh's version: it assumes that Pakistan suddenly deciding that bedding with terrorists is too risky is a more likely scenario than Pakistan being too incompetent (or merely unwilling) to stand up against the US making the raid it's been wanting to make for a decade.
Sorry but he was a Muslim. You may not like his interpretation of Islam, but he was one.
Now of course he didn't deserve proper Muslim burial provided by the US Gov. Because it is not a state's job to provide such. The state job is to treat everyone equally.
And of course they will fight for the death for it, then flee somewhere else because of "persecution"
You can think whatever you want of Bin Laden, but it's the bleeding obvious that a lot of people consider him a muslim
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/10/mark-bowden-bin-laden...
The passport found by a cop, a few days later near ground zero :P
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satam_al-Suqami#Passport_disco...
>Suqami's passport was found by a passerby (identity unknown), reportedly in the vicinity of Vesey Street, before the towers collapsed.
> ... Two of the passports that have survived, those of Satam al Suqami and Abdul Aziz al Omari, were clearly doctored. To avoid getting into classified detail, we will just state that these [passports] were manipulated in a fraudulent manner in ways that have been associated with al Qaeda. ...
http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/archive/hearing7/9-11Comm...
Surrounding statements seem to contradict that, such as "And yet between 1992 and September 11th, 2001 we have not found any signs that intelligence, law enforcement or border inspection services sought to acquire, develop or disseminate systematic information about al Qaeda's or other terrorist groups travel and passport practices." How did they know the manipulations were al Qaeda's if nobody had been tracking their techniques for years? I guess it can be squared by presuming they cataloged some information post-9/11 (possibly including "training manuals recovered in the mid 1990s") that had been available before but not closely examined. I wonder if the determination of what al Qaeda passport techniques look like was a bit circularly-defined or sloppy, since they had little information to start with and concluded the investigation quickly.
Hint: if you do understand arabic, just compare what you hear to the translation spread in the western medias ;)
interestingly this is only ever apparent when a topic comes up that I am an expert in.
In politics, meanwhile, the true experts are more-often-than-not the people who left the room early before the shouting began. ;)
Which topic?
What other circumstances would you expect it in?
I can speak from first-hand experience that this is exactly how matters of this nature are handled. The general account of Bin Laden's death may be true, but the government chose which details they wanted to drive the narrative and selectively released those. i.e. the heroism of the SEALS vs that our "ally" was hiding a terrorist.
> i.e. the heroism of the SEALS vs that our "ally" was hiding a terrorist.
Perhaps I'm a jaded New Yorker with a family member having, at one time, a "high title" in an international news corporation. They worked for many companies, this isn't a liberal/conservative or democrat/republican comment.
I do not trust what our politicians or news corporations say at face value. Nor am I naive to believe that US "allies" would tell "the whole truth and nothing but the truth". Every story is laced with certain amount of spice - this goes for news, company lines, startup elevator pitches, etc.
I'm not sure how you are framing your initial sentence: are you being fastidious or attempting to be cordial in calling straight bullshit. However, why is anyone surprised? Everyone spins the truth to their benefit.
The most eye opening experience I've ever had was being in a news room, reading a live report from Baghdad reporter while listening to an anchor a few feet away. The disparity between the two was so staggering that I renounced all news instantly and felt disgusted. I understand news companies have to make money but what they say isn't "news". In my opinion, CNN, Fox News, CNBC, and TMZ are all flavors of the same marketing machine.
News/Politicians = Convenient truth which sells ads.
edit: spelling, clarity.
I was referring to a internal system which reporters and producers share which doesn't have a public feed.
If you watch some news reports, you'll notice a bunch of people at their desks with a small screen next to their larger monitors. That smaller screen is something like an IRC chat which is used to coordinate assets between reporters and producers.
http://radio.foxnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/FNCNewsr...
This is from fox news - notice those small monitors that look out of place.
https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8018/7405270916_7cd37ba78f_b.j...
This is from CNN, notice that most monitors have CNN as their screen saver while some, with no one sitting next to them, have block boxes.
I can't find the quote now but it was from an editor of a news magazine who said something like: If you didn't read the news for a whole year, away from civilization, you probably wouldn't miss anything very important.
This particular piece gives the Obama administration a tremendous pass by failing to mention what the made up narrative did to the Pakistani vaccination program.
> During the Iraq war, reporters informed us that a mob of jubilant Iraqis toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. Never mind that there were so few local people trying to pull the statue down that they needed the help of a U.S. military crane.
Here's an (edited) video of the event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Snyz8sn2-z4
I'm 90% certain I watched this live at home in the morning when I was home sick from school. There were a smattering of people trying to bring it down and then the crowd got bigger and then the U.S. crane came in and helped. This happened over the course of an hour or two. I remember thinking it was cool that U.S. military helped out.
Where does this claim of the false narrative come in?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firdos_Square_statue_destructi...
If you look how the image is framed (especially in the Fox coverage) the framing cuts out or de-emphasizes the vehicle while emphasizing the (quite small) Iraqi crowd. The accompanying commentary is all about the crowd throwing stuff (they seem to be standing around, mostly). And the later coverage definitely emphasized the Iraqis pulling down the status with US help, not (say) the US pulling down the statue while Iraqi's mostly watched.
The propaganda machine around this event is disgusting.
Take down Saddam's stature by all means, but do not fake it, especially to your own electorate.
Most reasons given mention OBL's propaganda value - but was he really that popular? Did he have t-shirts or something similar a la Che Guevara? Would stronger proof of his death have attracted more people to his cause?
Could not mystique in the end prove stronger than martyrdom? At least a couple of religions describe the return of a prophet.
Isn't it also possible to have very good reasons for either releasing photos of his death or not killing him? The kind of terrorist who might emulate OBL would probably prefer death on the battlefield to capture or execution. So it's not clear what kind of deterrent effect all the secrecy has delivered.
I can however think of a few reasons to kill him quickly and release as few details as possible. Independent verification of anything might produce inconvenient facts, that would cast doubt on all other claims. A commenter said Pakistan does not act as a single entity, which is true, but neither does the US. So who knows what a debriefing might have revealed?
If my only choices are either believing what the government says, or believing what a decorated investigative journalist says, I'm going with the investigative journalist. The government simply has too much of an incentive to lie about something like this.
Also it's not a question of accepting Hersh vs the government. It's a matter of balancing Hersh's investigative reporting with the details provided by other investigative reporters.
Seems like he's onto something but, like he was told when his story was rejected, I don't think he has it all figured out yet.
EDIT: These two sentences in particular are very un-Hirsch: "(The informant and his family were smuggled out of Pakistan and relocated in the Washington area. He is now a consultant for the CIA.)" Doesn't name the informant (who would obviously be in a protection program) but gives the city and employer? Why? It's unrelated to the story. If it's only important enough to be in parenthesis, probably shouldn't risk putting a man and his family's life at risk over the disclosure.
The sooner truth comes out - the faster we learn from our mistakes.
Rushing to publish unsubstantiated anonymous information that other investigators politely but publicly disagree with is hardly the path to Truth. A better piece published in a more reputable publication, however, might be.
Could you name investigators that disagree with Hersh's version of events about killing Osama Bin Laden?
‘‘It’s always possible,’’ Bowden told me. ‘‘But given the sheer number of people I talked to from different parts of government, for a lie to have been that carefully orchestrated and sustained to me gets into faked-moon-landing territory.’’ Other reporters have been less generous still. ‘‘What’s true in the story isn’t new, and what’s new in the story isn’t true,’’ said Peter Bergen of CNN, who wrote his own best-selling account of the hunting and killing of bin Laden, ‘‘Manhunt.’’
... Filkins, who covered Afghanistan and Pakistan for The Times before moving to The New Yorker, spent about a week running the tip by sources inside the Pakistani government and military with little success. ‘‘It wasn’t even that I was getting angry denials,’’ Filkins told me. ‘‘I was getting blank stares.’’
It was reported both in the mainstream media at the time, as well as featuring in Hersh's version of events. They (of course) don't quite match up, but the vaccination program definitely played a role in both versions.
It's a bit weird to leave it out. Not like the reporter wouldn't have come across it, and the repercussions are quite real.
I'm not sure it's so much dumbing down as careless use of word. Before you teach something you often have to unlearn the things you learned as part of learning. Overuse of certain words or concepts are quite common in technology too. Though we also often make the somewhat different mistake of being too specific.
* A move to push OBL to come out of the bushes to denounce its fake death, and get an opportunity to catch him this way ?
* A move to get Obama reelected ?
What else could be seen as foul ? I mean it's a war against Islamic terrorism, I'd understand if some plays were little lies. Manipulating the public can be okay if it's not for risky purposes.
I suppose it's also possible that there is some alternative narrative that's being covered up, such as the CIA actually keeping him alive (or telling Pakistan to do so) as "bait" to catch other members of his network or for some sort of propaganda or psyops purpose. Maybe we'll know in 25 years.
That is, no possible gain that a rational person would understand. But Islam is not a rational memeplex.
In many ways, Pakistan is like Saudi Arabia or Turkey: countries the US cannot afford not to be allies, but with very different strategic interests, often conflicting with US ones. I don't find at all strange that they might have harbored Osama all along, just as another bit of leverage in the eternal game of foreign policy.
Hersh’s most consequential claim was about how bin Laden was found in the first place. It was not years of painstaking intelligence-gathering, he wrote, that led the United States to the courier and, ultimately, to bin Laden. Instead, the location was revealed by a ‘‘walk-in’’ — a retired Pakistani intelligence officer who was after the $25 million reward that the United States had promised anyone who helped locate him. For that matter, bin Laden was hardly ‘‘in hiding’’ at all; his compound in Abbottabad was actually a safe house, maintained by the Pakistani intelligence service. When the United States confronted Pakistani intelligence officials with this information, Hersh wrote, they eventually acknowledged it was true and even conceded to provide a DNA sample to prove it.