The Killing of Osama bin Laden

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false...

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

Who is responsible for the Pakistan school massacre?

Depends who you ask.

The Pakistan Taliban (TTP), the breakaway group that is spearheading an insurgency against the Pakistani state, has proudly admitted to having executed the horrifying atrocity that took the lives of 148 innocents, including over 130 children.

US officials have been quick to point the finger at Pakistan, noting the role of the notorious ‘S Wing’ of state military intelligence, the ISI, in covertly sponsoring various Taliban factions inside Afghanistan.

And Prime Minister Nawar Sharif, clearly feeling the pressure, has for the first time ever conceded the ISI’s duplicitous strategy and now vows that he will no longer distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Taliban, but will bravely fight them all “until the last terrorist is killed.”

Some in Pakistani diaspora communities in the west, however, have a different view. “Mossad did it,” I’ve heard from a surprising number of people. “To make Muslims look bad.” Others blame the CIA, or MI6, or both – indeed, all three.

This sort of pathetic, ignorant denialism is almost as bad as the pathetic official finger pointing. The sad truth is that none of these actors are free of responsibility for the murky origins of the TTP.

The double game
It is, of course, a matter of record that the Pakistani ISI has secretly supported the Afghan Taliban for more than a decade, a matter I have tracked and documented since even before 9/11. Yet from the very inception of this policy, it has been pursued with tacit and selective US support...

http://www.nafeezahmed.com/2014/12/who-is-responsible-for-pakistan-school.html

The 9/11 Joint Congressional Inquiry and 28 Missing Pages

When the report of Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 was released in December 2002, it was met with considerable skepticism. That skepticism grew for a period of time but then was reduced to speculation about what was contained in the 28 pages that had been redacted by the Bush White House. Various U.S. government leaders have since suggested that the missing 28 pages point to Saudi Arabia’s complicity in the 9/11 crimes. However such musings fail to discuss other important issues, like the links between the Saudi regime and the Western deep state, or the fact that, from the start, even the Saudis were calling for the 28 pages to be released. Discussion of the missing 28 pages also omits mention of the highly suspicious nature of the Inquiry’s investigation and its leaders.

The leaders of the 9/11 Joint Congressional Inquiry were Congressman Porter Goss and Senator Bob Graham, who headed-up the House and Senate intelligence committees at the time. Due to Goss and Graham’s activities before 9/11 and on that day, as well as their representation of the state of Florida, their leadership of the Inquiry presented a remarkable number of questions.

For example, Goss and Graham were meeting with Pakistani ISI General Mahmud Ahmedjust as the first plane struck the World Trade Center. The Ahmed meeting is interesting due to the Pakistani ISI’s history with the CIA in arming the “Afghan Arabs” from which al Qaeda evolved. The ISI had also been intimately linked with the terrorist network previously run by the CIA’s partner—the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Added to these coincidences was the fact that Goss and Graham had just returned from a trip to Pakistan in which they had specifically discussed Osama bin Laden, who was a topic of discussion at their 9/11 breakfast meeting as well.

It seems to be an unusual coincidence that the leader of the Pakistani ISI would be present as al Qaeda’s historic attack was taking place. Ahmed’s meeting with Goss and Graham is also notable in light of Goss’ history as a veteran CIA operative, a member of a secret assassination squad, and someone who was trained to recruit and run foreign operatives. It is also remarkable that Goss’ home district was the primary base for several of the alleged 9/11 hijackers...


http://digwithin.net/2014/03/16/28-missing-pages/

Blood Money, Kill Lists, Favors for Favors: Deep Inside the CIA’s Targeted Killings

Targeted killing — particularly the sort carried out by the U.S. fleet of deadly flying robots — is a transactional business.

That’s a major point of The Way of The Knife, the informative new book by Mark Mazzetti, a national-security correspondent for the New York Times. The U.S. drone campaign in Pakistan kicked off with the 2004 killing of Nek Mohammed, an extremist in the tribal areas who was not a senior al-Qaida figure. Mohammed was someone the Pakistanis wanted dead. The U.S. wanted access to Pakistan’s airspace and, it was once hoped, western tribal territory, where al-Qaida operated. Over the years, the U.S. got the former and (rarely) the latter, giving birth to a quid pro quo that spread to Yemen andbeyond.

That is not to say that Pakistani outrage over targeted killing was entirely fake. The arrest of CIA contractor Raymond Davis in Lahore — where, Mazzetti writes, he was tracking terrorists working with Pakistani intelligence — inflamed the country right before SEALs invaded to kill Osama bin Laden; the Pakistanis view their soil as more inviolable than their airspace. The drone strikes didn’t stop. But they dipped significantly during 2011 and 2012.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/04/mark-mazzetti/

2002: U.S. Reopens Arms Case In Probe for Taliban Role

Federal investigators are reexamining a recent arms smuggling case in Florida to determine whether agents of the Pakistani government tried to buy missiles and nuclear weapons components in the United States last year for use by terrorists or Pakistan's military.

The original criminal case -- a sting operation in which intermediaries allegedly tried to buy the weapons from a diamond thief-turned-informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms -- attracted little public notice when arrests were made in June 2001. It resulted in a single guilty plea and the sealing of court files for another defendant.

One reason, informed sources said, was that prosecutors, in an unusual step, removed references to Pakistan from public filings because of diplomatic concerns.

The alleged weapons buyers repeatedly said in conversations taped by authorities that they represented the Pakistani government and were arranging the purchases for Pakistani intelligence, the then-Taliban government of Afghanistan or terrorists.

via washingtonpost.com

RANDY GLASS AND OPERATION DIAMONDBACK

Spring 1999 (B): Randy Glass is a con artist turned government informant participating in a sting called Operation Diamondback. [Palm Beach Post, 9/29/01] He discusses an illegal weapons deal with an Egyptian American named Mohamed el Amir. In wiretapped conversations, Mohamed discusses the need to get false papers to disguise a shipment of illegal weapons. His brother, Dr. Magdy el Amir, has been a wealthy neurologist in Jersey City for the past twenty years. Two other weapons dealers later convicted in sting operation involving Glass also lived in Jersey City, and both el Amirs admit knowing one of them, Diaa Mohsen (see June 12, 2001). Mohsen has been paid at least once by Dr. el Amir. In 1998, Congressman Ben Gilman was given a foreign intelligence report suggesting that Dr. el Amir owns an HMO that is secretly funded by bin Laden, and that money is being skimmed from the HMO to fund terrorist activities. The state of New Jersey later buys the HMO and determines that $15 million were unaccounted for and much of that has been diverted into hard-to-trace offshore bank accounts.MSNBC, 3/18/03 (B)]

via s3.amazonaws.com

Mullen Takes on the ISI

The killing of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former Afghan president who led the High Peace Council, illustrates all too well the tremendous obstacles to a meaningful reconciliation among Afghanistan's various factions. Before his death on September 20 at the hands of a man who claimed to be an emissary of the Quetta Shura, Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik, had been in charge of reconciliation efforts with Taliban insurgents. His appointment had apparently been meant as a way to pull the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance into the peace process. The jury is still out on exactly who ordered the killing -- the Taliban first claimed and then denied involvement -- but its implications are clear. Rabbani's assassination, the latest in a systematic campaign of targeted killings of high-profile anti-Taliban Afghan leaders, has increased the chance that tensions among the Northern Alliance, the Taliban, and other Islamist Pashtun groups could devolve into all-out war.

The beneficiary of this uncertainty is the region's primary spoiler: the Pakistani military. Although its generals have received billions of dollars in U.S. aid since 9/11 to combat terrorism, they have consistently done everything in their power to bolster it. They selectively cooperate with the United States, apprehending al Qaeda militants and fighting the Pakistani Taliban insurgents -- which also threaten the Pakistani military -- while sheltering and supporting other radical extremists, such as the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network, which spearhead the deadly cross-border insurgency in Afghanistan.

via foreignaffairs.com

'They come from ISI' - Afghan colonel on insurgent threat

via longwarjournal.org

9/11 Joe Biden Meets To Finance The Pakistani ISI Who Supply And Control The Taliban

via youtube.com

Mahmood Ahmed -- Pakistan ISI Director

via youtube.com

ISI scripted 26/11 Mumbai attacks, approved by al-Qaida: Shahzad book

"NEW DELHI: The 26/11 terror attacks that killed 166 people and brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war were scripted by ISI officers and approved before execution by al-Qaida commanders, according to a book just written by slain Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad .
The 40-year-old reporter in his book titled 'Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taleban - beyond bin Laden and 9/11' describes the Mumbai plan as one pushed through by Ilyas Kashmiri , a key al-Qaida ally with wide links with the Pakistan defence establishment . Shahzad, who was an authority on terrorism in Afghanistan and the neighbourhood, says in the book that the plan was authored by Inter-Services Intelligence officers and executed by Lashkar-e-Taiba..."
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics/nation/ISI-scripted-26/11-M...

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"A surge of outrage and grief jolted Pakistan last night after the discovery of the body of a journalist who had highlighted alleged links between al-Qa’ida and the country’s military, two days after he went missing in Islamabad. It appears he had been tortured and beaten before being killed and his body dumped.

Human rights campaigners, who have highlighted Pakistan as one of the most dangerous places for journalists to work, said they believed Syed Saleem Shahzad, the 40-year-old correspondent for Asia Times Online, had been abducted by the intelligence services after the publication of an article about a recent militant attack on a naval base. Mr Shahzad, who had previously been questioned by the InterServices Intelligence (ISI) agency, had warned the authorities might act against him and had even revealed a previous threat.

In an email to Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch (HRW) last October, Mr Shahzad had forwarded details of a meeting when he had questioned by senior ISI officials over a an earlier controversial article. He had written: “Dear Hasan, I am forwarding this email to you for your record only if in case something happens to me or my family in future...”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/leading-journalist-murdered-by-p...

Spy For A Spy: The CIA-ISI Showdown Over Raymond Davis

via afpak.foreignpolicy.com

The Afghanistan War the Mujahideen and the Golden Crescent

via youtube.com