How the bin Laden raid went down

DETAILED ACCOUNT OF THE BIN LADEN RAID Reveals How It Nearly Ended In Disaster:

Osama bin Laden mission was Bush's fault!

Osama bin Laden mission agreed in secret 10 years ago by US and Pakistan | World news | The Guardian

The US and Pakistan struck a secret deal almost a decade ago permitting a US operation against Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil similar to last week's raid that killed the al-Qaida leader, the Guardian has learned.

The deal was struck between the military leader General Pervez Musharraf and President George Bush after Bin Laden escaped US forces in the mountains of Tora Bora in late 2001, according to serving and retired Pakistani and US officials.

Under its terms, Pakistan would allow US forces to conduct a unilateral raid inside Pakistan in search of Bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the al-Qaida No3. Afterwards, both sides agreed, Pakistan would vociferously protest the incursion.

"There was an agreement between Bush and Musharraf that if we knew where Osama was, we were going to come and get him," said a former senior US official with knowledge of counterterrorism operations. "The Pakistanis would put up a hue and cry, but they wouldn't stop us."

Brilliant leak! Now if the net outcome of the raid turns negative, Obama can blame it all on
Bush!

Let there be - conspiracy theories!

Ding, dong, Osama's dead - or is he, really?

Via American Digest, I find this post by Cobb, "Because he's not dead yet:"

C'mon. You don't get your mitts on Bin Laden just to kill him, and you don't have 40 SEALs who are too slow to tackle the dude. There's is no picture because he's not dead yet. They're twisting him on a spit and slow roasting him until he's so tender the secrets just drip of the bones. They've got him simmering in pentathol. ...

He's certainly not free or missing, that's for sure. He's never going to see the light of day. But is he dead at this very moment? You will never know.

Which makes me wonder about the bogus death photos that got shown to some members of Congress.

A day after the White House said it will not release the official photo of Usama bin Laden’s body, many are wondering how a handful of lawmakers were duped into believing they saw it. ...

The announcement came after at least three U.S. lawmakers claimed to have seen what they believed was an authentic photograph of Bin Laden, shot in the face and chest during a CIA-led Navy SEALs operation Sunday at a secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
But those photos appear to have been doctored images sent by an undisclosed source or sources to members of Congress, including Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., who admitted Wednesday he’d been fooled into thinking the picture was real.
After telling reporters he had seen an image that confirmed Usama is "definitely dead," Brown later said "the photo that I saw and that a lot of other people saw is not authentic.

Let us take Cobb's conspiracy theory to its logical limit! I can conspiracy conspire with the best of 'em:

Q: Why did the White house dither so long on whether to release photos of bin Laden's corpse and then announce there would be no release?
A: There are no photos of bin Laden's corpse because bin Laden is not a corpse. He was snatched, not killed. The bogus photos that some Members received came from the CIA. They were trial balloons of deliberately faked photos. The "leak" was actually a test of the photos' credibility. It was only after they had been quickly debunked that the White House pulled the plug on using them as "official" photos.

Q: What about the burial at sea?
A: There was no burial at sea off USS Carl Vinson, some of whose officers and crew, including the captain, are part of the conspiracy. As for the SEALs and crews of the Army's 160th SOAR who flew the mission, they won't even tell you what they had for breakfast this morning, much less the respiratory status of a body brought out of a mission objective.

Q: So why the elaborate cover story that OBL was killed?
A: We don't want his successors in al Qaeda to know that OBL, having been waterboarded before 24 hours passed, has spilled his guts just as fully as 9/11's mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did after he was captured.

Q: Wait! Bin Laden was water boarded? I thought that Obama outlawed that!
A: Yeah, right. Remember, there's an election coming up in only, what 550 days or so. You think that not water boarding OBL is going to stand in the way of a second term? Just wait until the three months before November when we are incrementally fed through a thoroughly compliant media story after story of terrorist plots stopped by analyzing the intel info grabbed during the raid.

And stipulating that all Cobb proposes is true ... does the president know? Or does he really think that OBL is chatting it up right now with Luca Brazzi?

Think it couldn't happen? Remember that naval intelligence actually removed FDR from the distribution list of intercepted, decoded Japanese signals in the months before Pearl Harbor.

The problem with all this, of course, is that "three may keep a secret if two of them are dead." As Chuck Colson, who did prison time for being part of the Watergate coverup, put it, a conspiracy always gets blown, and the more people there are in it, the quicker.

This is exactly why I still insist that proof of OBLs' death must be made public. Not only will it dampen some (not all) of the conspiracy theories already abounding in Muslim lands, failure to do so will make it more likely that similar conpsiracy theories will start to gain credibility here. This must not happen.

For the record: I believe that the SOF operators went into the compound knowing that there was a high likelihood that OBL was there - but that killing or capturing him was not the highest priority of the mission, though high indeed it was. To repeat myself,

The real value of this raid is less the death of bin Laden, as emotionally satisfying as Americans find it, than the trove of materials gathered. ... What the raid did was retrieve enormously important al Qaeda hard drives and documents from Osama bin Laden's house, incidentally killing bin Laden as they did so.

Even if bin Laden had not been there, the raid would have been a smashing success because of the intelligence goldmine, the capture of which was surely of no lower priority than confronting bin Laden. But OBL was there. The SEALs killed him. Could they have captured him instead? We'll never know. But dead he is at the close-up hands of the US military. And what's even better, the US Congress authorized it.

Little gunfire during bin Laden raid

I speculated earlier today that there was probably not a lot of gunfire during the SEALs' raid on Osama bin Laden's Abottabad compound last Sunday.

There was not near the kind of firefight that we were told took place for the first 20 minutes of the raid. Since the official account of the sequence during the raid is about on it ninety-eleventh version, we do not know how much gunfire there actually was. Was there only one of the compound's residents armed, as one report says? Whatever, the compound was not an armed camp. While there might well have been 20 minutes elapse from the first to the last shot, it's hardly likely that firing was continuous or even frequent during that time. SEALs don't shoot a lot; they don't need to.

Just a few minutes ago, NBC Nightly News reported that there was only a little shooting inside the compound and almost all of it done by the SEALs. The only man who shot at the SEALs was a bodyguard, who promptly went to meet his 72 virgins.

The report also said that the SEALs encountered bin Laden's 19-year-old son on an interior stair and shot him dead. Osama himself peered down the stairs, saw the SEALs and ran back into his room, barely dodging a burst from a SEAL. The SEALs charged into the bedroom, where one shot bin Laden's wife in the leg. Another SEAL shot bin Laden once in the chest and once in the head. That was all the shooting. The rest of the 40 minutes the SEALs spent on the ground was taken up by piling as much material of intelligence value as possible into their grab bags.

The real value of this raid is less the death of bin Laden, as emotionally satisfying as Americans find it, than the trove of materials gathered. That's why I earlier wrote that what the raid did was retrieve "enormously important al Qaeda hard drives and documents from Osama bin Laden's house, incidentally killing bin Laden as they did so."

Did US shut down Pak electrical and comms in Abbottabad to raid bin Laden?

A very titillating tidbit is found in this ABC report:

Residents near the bin Laden compound told ABC News that just before the stealth helicopters arrived, all electricity and cellphone service was knocked out and then came back on right after the choppers left.

If true, this is a stunning report. It would indicate that US Special Operations Command has the ability to do something like an EMP - electromagnetic pulse - that is not a pulse, but a continuous, disabling stream of EM energy that can be turned on and off at will. Frankly, I'm skeptical because the power and transmission requirements for such a device would be enormous. Jamming cellphone frequencies would be of little challenge to signals specialists, but shutting down even part of an electrical grid by non-destructive, non-invasive means would be incredibly daunting.

But there are some interesting other sources: "Making sense of the Osama op through tweets."

There are also references in the tweets of a blackout in the town, roads being blocked, telephones going dead and sirens being sounded. It is not clear whether these things happened during the raid or after the US choppers had left with bin Laden's body.

Even so, the question is begged just why there was not even a Pakistani police response during the 40 minutes that US special ops were on the ground. The answer would seem to lead down two divergent trails:

1. There was secret Pakistani involvement in the raid who stopped Abbottabad authorities from responding. Regardless of what the Pak government's official, public stance is toward OBL or the raid, it may be that there was a level of cooperation that no one wants to talk about. In fact, to take this conspiracy theory all the way, might there have been a "rogue" cell within the Pak military of intelligence service that cooperated with no knowledge by, much less sanction of, the Pak government?

2. There was not near the kind of firefight that we were told took place for the first 20 minutes of the raid. Since the official account of the sequence during the raid is about on it ninety-eleventh version, we do not know how much gunfire there actually was. Was there only one of the compound's residents armed, as one report says? Whatever, the compound was not an armed camp. While there might well have been 20 minutes elapse from the first to the last shot, it's hardly likely that firing was continuous or even frequent during that time. SEALs don't shoot a lot; they don't need to. For that matter, special operators have silenced weapons that are not publicized. (In World War II, the OSS developed a pistol so silent that OSS Director Bill Donovan took it into the the Oval Office and fired several rounds into a small sandbag he had brought with him. Roosevelt, who was looking away while he dictated a letter, did not even turn around. This according to Donovan's deputy, Stanley Lovell, in his book Of Spies and Stratagems.)

The tweets from Abbottabad refer to how much noise the helicopters made in and over bin Laden's compound, although the choppers' approaches seem not to have been perceived very much. What gunfire sounds did come from the compound may have been overwhelmed by the machine noise.

Still, the lack or emergency response is more than a little curious. Forty minutes is quite enough time for at least a few police patrols to have reached the compound. Why didn't they? The US government is not asking, and the Pakistanis aren't saying.

Curiouser and curiouser.