Osama bin Laden was found because his family hung their clothes out to dry
nypost.com
nypost.com
It's presents the clothes line as the detail that busted the case wide open. I'm sure they had some more hard evidence to go on before deciding to raid it. Can you imagine intelligence officials in a meeting with Obama: "Mr President, this house in Pakistan hangs up too many clothes to dry. It has to be Bin Laden"
> It had no telephone lines or Internet service.
I wonder how the CIA got this info from Abbottabad Telecom. Pay someone? Hack into their systems? In my imagination it's someone local going undercover to work for them and extract the info. People think being a spy is James Bond stuff but it's infiltrating a... telecoms company.
TLDR; after years of hard work and different intelligence tactics being deployed to actually find him they confirmed Osama likely lives at a house due to the number of garments hanging on the line matching the number of people in his family.
As if they'd reveal an informant or other (more plausible) means of getting that information.
They had arrived at a suspect house, identified the driver, but had to rely on the clothesline for such information? I call BS. But it makes for a good story.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2277145-cias-hunt-for-o...
In fact I like that they went out of their way to validate their target instead of just going in all cowboy and shooting the place up on limited intel.
Amazing the level of mental gymnastics that people are prone to when the objectives of national security come into relief.
However we are talking about a man who murdered thousands of innocents in cold blood. And shocked the whole world.
If people already have distrust for the local medical service, that's a local problem they should address. If they feel like helping to track down a mass murderer makes that health service even less trustworthy, they really are supporting the wrong side.
I think the only thing they did wrong was killing Bin Laden. I feel he should have stood trial for that. They shouldn't have killed him no matter how much he deserved it. Even the worst Nazis stood trial. I know it would have given him a stage but it was still wrong.
But I think sending a fake medical team in to confirm was a small measure considering what he had done. I'm sure even the police would do things like that in much less important cases.
That's your bar?
"But the final clue was the clotheslines on the compound, which flapped each day with women’s garments, shalwar kameez worn by Pakistani men, children’s outfits and diapers — far more than the 11 members of the bodyguards’ families could ever wear."
Perhaps you only read the title? because I agree it's a clickbait.
Besides the clothelines, I mention two other things that are in the article only.
Perhaps you've only skimmed my comment? :-)
Not before the CIA faked a vaccination campaign to get some blood samples for confirmation, thus compromising the concept of vaccinations in the region, of course.