Gareth Porter writes: A few days after US Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a “senior intelligence official” briefing reporters on the materials seized from bin Laden’s compound said the materials revealed that bin Laden had, “continued to direct even tactical details of the group’s management.” Bin Laden was, “not just a strategic thinker for the group,” said the official. “He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions.” The official called the bin Laden compound, “an active command and control center.”
The senior intelligence official triumphantly called the discovery of bin Laden’s hideout, “the greatest intelligence success perhaps of a generation,” and administration officials could not resist leaking to reporters that a key element in that success was that the CIA interrogators had gotten the name of bin Laden’s trusted courier from al-Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo. CIA Director Leon Panetta was quite willing to leave the implication that some of the information had been obtained from detainees by “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Such was the official line at the time. But none of it was true. It is now clear that CIA officials were blatantly misrepresenting both bin Laden’s role in al-Qaeda when he was killed and how the agency came to focus on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
In fact, during his six years in Abbottabad, bin Laden was not the functioning head of al-Qaeda at all, but an isolated figurehead who had become irrelevant to the actual operations of the organization. The real story, told here for the first time, is that bin Laden was in the compound in Abbottabad because he had been forced into exile by the al-Qaeda leadership.
The CIA’s claim that it found bin Laden on its own is equally false. In fact, the intensive focus on the compound in Abbottabad was the result of crucial intelligence provided by the Pakistani intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Truthout has been able to reconstruct the real story of bin Laden’s exile in Abbottabad, as well as how the CIA found him, thanks in large part to information gathered last year from Pakistani tribal and ISI sources by retired Pakistani Brig. Gen. Shaukat Qadir. But that information was confirmed, in essence, in remarks after the bin Laden raid by the same senior intelligence official cited above – remarks that have been ignored until now. [Continue reading…]
Some good reporting…US administration and media caught with their lies still on their tongues. It is always a good policy to weigh one report against another and this evidence indicates where one should (or should not) place the fulcrum of the scales in future cases.
Though I didn’t find Porter’s ideologizing in his long ago pro-Hanoi analysis, since Bush in Iraq his analysis has been flawless. As indefatigable as Seymour Hersh in his chasing down WashDC sources, he has written history objectively and profoundly as it happened. Now, invariably, he is the one to tell us the truth about the binLaden “takedown” rightly so; for the American Gov has lived up to his worst expectations. We drowned in neocons created Bus-it, only to see Obama make it his own in his desperate attempt to return to Bush circa pre-9/11, preoccupation with China. To do this politically he had to shut up the neocons and Israelis by capping his reversal of his Afghan doubling-down (in far of the generals) with the killing of binLaden. All along, info coming from friends in the know, once again, proved that Obama is a rudderless totally political president. But though seeming Lilliputian standing next to our expectations, he stands like a giant next to the Republican alternative, a dangerous sect-based camellion whose real motives for seeking the presidency are scary to contemplate. Obama is the devil we know…but what a devil! Nevertheless, his morphing is not as species-variable as Romney’s. A presidential candidates who can morph in so many ways as Romney does can’t possibly control any one of these morphs under pressure. On the other hand, Obama IS the President and his actions as president proved that, with Teddy Kennedy dead, he seamlessly followed the Clintons, the once arch enemies. Perhaps that’s where he got the Afghan “doubling down” to prove Dems ain’t no pussies. Totally let down by lying generals, Obama chose to kill bilnLaden Chicago-style, as he did with others from alQaeda, including US citizens. Furthermore, he put on the Bush-it jacket and turned it into the Obamas-it long-coat; so much so that, without knowing who are his sources, Jim Marrs managed to blow a hole through GW Bush-it–>Obamas-it contineum with a book that kept drilling with info lazers right through Obama’s version of binLaden’s fate:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Terror-Conspiracy-Deception-Liberty/dp/1932857435/ref=lh_ni_t
Porter has been educating us piecemeal without all the fantasy overarching conspiracy baggage that Marrs saddled himself with. Nevertheless, to us all it is now clear that an entire nation was mobilized and exsanguinated to cover-up the reckless endangerment of America by the rules-violating-to-save-money airlines, resulting in four jumbo-liners taken over in 10 min. each and used as missiles. In that cover-up binLaden was painted as a super-giant and the media whores seized on that revenue stream of scoops. Still, as the lesser of evils, I will vote for the Black Capone; given how passive we were as our soldiers were sent to senseless doom in Iraq, we deserve no better…yet, certainly not the much more dangerous Mormon shape-morpher. In Beijing and Moscow they must be laughing having seen how the Mossad– so well plugged into alQaeda through paid Palestinian spies– was able to make this nation their mad dog sent to “fetch” Saddam Hussein for them. Obama’s trying to turn the ship of state around; that’s why the neocons can’t stand that “uppity schwartza” shifting our attention from the Near to the Far East.