Posted on 05/04/2011 5:27:20 AM PDT by Scanian
Does anyone swallow the Pakistani government's claim that Osama bin Laden lived in that Abbottabad villa for at least six years without anyone getting wind?
As it happens, I know Abbottabad rather well, having visited it on several occasions since 1971.
Situated in the lower recesses of the Pakistani uplands, the small town was used for centuries to keep a watch on the Khyber Pass. The British, who liked to recruit soldiers from the nearby Pathan and Punjab regions, built a garrison town there -- and then a military school to train Pathan and Punjabi non-commissioned officers, the backbone of the colonial army. (A fictionalized version of the town appears in Rudyard Kipling's "Kim.")
With independence, the school became a full-fledged military college, the Pakistani West Point. In 1962, the dictator Muhammad Ayub Khan simply confiscated all land in and around Abbottabad on behalf of the army. Part of the land was distributed among senior army officers, who built sumptuous villas to benefit from the area's superb climate and magical environment.
Today, anybody who's somebody in the Pakistani high command owns a villa there -- including Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, head of the Pakistani armed forces. Like former President Pervez Musharraf, Kayani graduated from the town's military academy, just 200 yards from bin Laden's villa.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
I don’t believe the Pakistani government’s claim that they didn’t know that he was there...but I do believe that democrats and neo-cons are lying when they say Pakistan didn’t know so that instead of doing something like cutting off all aid to that country, that business as usual can continue.
Why aren’t the double dealing Democrats being fingered?
I think its entirely possible that the current president didn’t know anything (After all, his wife was killed by the same animals) but its pretty hard to believe that their intel services didn’t know.
I do think this is largely the result of our touchy feely foreign policy. We should have been far more aggressive with Pakistan from the beginning. They have nukes which complicates things but we could have used their nuclear neighbor next door to make them miserable.
I heard a news report this morning that two years ago, a geography class at UCLA, using public information on OBL’s movements identified his likely hideout as Abbottabad, with an 88.9% probability.
Pretty much sez it all about Pok-ee-stahn (Obama’s affected pronunciation)
That is a really tough question.
Who to believe? The Pakis or the Obamites?
Let me get back with you on that one...
No, but a blog post at Science Insider calls the crew's efforts "none too shabby."
UCLA geographers Thomas Gillespie and John Agnew and a class of undergraduates published a 2009 paper predicting the location of Bin Laden and guessing he would be in a large town rather than a cave.
The paper named the city of Parachinar as his most likely hide-out, and the model the researchers used said there was an 88.9% chance Bin Laden was in Abbottabad, Pakistan, according to the blog by the publishers of the journal Science:
The Bin Laden tracking idea began as a project in an undergraduate class on remote sensing that Gillespie, whose expertise is using remote sensing data from satellites to study ecosystems, taught in 2009. Based on information from satellites and other remote sensing systems, and reports on his movements since his last known location, the students created a probabilistic model of where he was likely to be.
“The theory was basically that if you’re going to try and survive, you’re going to a region with a low extinction rate: a large town,” Gillespie says. “We hypothesized he wouldn’t be in a small town where people could report on him.”
So Gillespie said he was not surprised to hear U.S. forces had found Bin Laden in a larger town. But he told the blog Bin Laden could have made a better choice in real estate: “An inconspicuous house would have suited him better," he said.
Well, you wanna believe REAL Muslims or a Muslim by osmosis who is also a Chicago thug corruptocrat?
I’ll bet you could lay out aerial photographs of the NW Paki region in front of a random selection of FReepers and most of them would put a red circle on that OBL compound.
Sticks out like a sore thumb, if you ask me. And how convenient to have an army installation right next door!
I’m surprised he wasn’t actually over the border in Kashmir. He’s close but not quite there. The cost of living is lower; the food is better; the climate superb.
If this UCLA geo prof predicted this location using non-classified data two years ago I’m sure our intel agencies knew exactly where he was even further back then that.
I guess Bin Laden’s usefulness to the CIA was up and it was time to get rid of him.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that Osama and Hitler were both announced as dead on May 1 which is May Day for the internationalist collectivists.
You sure are asking tough questions for so early in the day...
Hey, it’s OK-—I can’t answer it either.
India Had Warned The U.S. That Bin Laden Was Hiding Close To Islamabad (Why didn’t we listen?)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2714783/posts
India had twice told the U.S. that Osama Bin Laden was not in a cave somewhere but hiding in an urban area close to Islamabad, according to a report by The Times of India. The information is also likely to fuel speculation that Pakistan knew of the al-Qaeda leader’s whereabouts.
The first lead came in mid-2007, soon after bin Laden’s ally Ayman al-Zawahiri attended a Taliban meeting in Peshawar, that was also attended by leaders of Haqqani network, an insurgent group based in North Waziristan, and at least two ISI officials. Zawahiri is said to have rushed to Islamabad after the meeting and Indian operatives began receiving information that bin Laden’s allies were working in the region.
The next lead came in 2008, when Indian officials were tipped off that bin Laden was ill and hiding out in a cantonment in the area. An official told The Times of India:
“This time we specifically mentioned about his presence in a cantonment area. It was because we had definite information that his movement was restricted owing to his illness and that it would have been impossible for him to go to an ordinary hospital. We told the Americans that only in a cantonment area could he be looked after by his ISI or other Pakistani benefactors.”
The official said he believes Pakistani officials may finally have turn bin Laden in because he had become too much of a “liability”.
It is unclear why American authorities didn’t consider the information and raises more questions about Pakistan’s alleged involvement in safe housing bin Laden. The news comes amidst reports in Pakistan that bin Laden was killed by his bodyguard.
Pakistan Claims It Warned About Compound In 2009
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2714738/posts
NEWSCORE - Pakistan hit back Wednesday about US fears that it could not be trusted with details of the raid on osama bin Laden’s compound and claimed it had identified the potential hideout as far back as 2009.
The foreign minister, Salman Bashir, said CIA chief Leon Panetta’s suggestion that Pakistan could have tipped off the al Qaeda leader and jeopardized Sunday’s operation was “disquieting.”
“He is entitled to his views, but I know for sure that we have extended every cooperation to the US, including the CIA, and to other countries as far as the campaign against terror is concerned,” Bashir told the BBC. “All the significant al Qaeda people who have been picked up, it was done by the ISI [Pakistan’s Intelligence Service], from Pakistan towns and cities.”
Bashir went on to claim that the ISI passed on its suspicions about the compound in Abbottabad two years ago.
“The fact is, on this particular occasion, it was pointed out by our intelligence quite some time ago to the US intelligence,” he said. “We had indicated as far back as 2009 [it was] a possible place.”
Bashir added that there were “millions” of other potential locations for bin Laden and that Pakistan had concentrated on the “caves and hideouts.”
The ISI said it again warned just six months ago that “suspicious foreigners” and even “al Qaeda operatives” were potentially inside the compound but denied knowing bin Laden was among them, according to Sky News. There was no immediate response to that claim from the Obama administration.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, said the events showed an intelligence failure, although his country should not shoulder all the blame.
“Certainly, we have intelligence failure of the rest of the world including the United States,” Gilani said in Paris. “There is intelligence failure of the whole world, not Pakistan alone.”
On Tuesday, Pakistan’s foreign ministry defended the ISI and issued a lengthy statement in which it expressed “deep concerns and reservations” about the US action.
It insisted unilateral action should not become the norm and stressed that Pakistani intelligence had been sharing information with the US in recent years.
“As far as the target compound is concerned, ISI had been sharing information with CIA and other friendly intelligence agencies since 2009.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13276540
Embarrassment grows for Pakistan security forces as 12-year-old reveals he was a regular visitor
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2714427/posts
Pakistan has admitted its embarrassment at intelligence failures which allowed the world’s most wanted man to live freely in its midst.
The Inter-Services Intelligence agency claims not to have known the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden despite him living in a $1m compound in Abbottabad.
But since the elimination of the terrorist mastermind by U.S. special forces on Sunday morning, the country has faced difficult questions over how he had escaped justice - for possibly as long as five or six years.
Further embarrassment followed today when the BBC interviewed a 12-year-old boy who said he used to visit the building where Bin Laden had died and had met the Al Qaeda leader’s family.
‘I used to go to their house. He had two wives, one spoke Arabic, and the other one spoke Urdu. They had three children, a girl and two boys. They gave me two rabbits. They had installed a camera at the outer gate so they could see people before they entered the house,’ Zarar Ahmed said.
It is incorrect to say the Pakistani government knew this or that about Osama’s location because that government is fractured and diffused. It has many power centers. It doesn’t even have control over “tribal areas”
What is accurate is say the ISI and some of the Paki military knew about Osama’s compound in Abbotabad
Obama Osama was living the good life for years there. No lack of sex partners. The only drawback is maybe he had to stay indoors a lot. Though some are saying he would hop into his ol Land Cruiser and visit training camps. Time will give us more juicy details on the lives of the rich and the terrorist
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