Posted on 05/16/2012 3:02:02 PM PDT by DogByte6RER
Osama Bin Laden Compound Model on Display at Pentagon
Turning a lot of heads today in a Pentagon hallway is the once-classified scale model of Osama bin Laden’s compound used to plan last year’s Special Operations raid. It marks the first public display of what was once America’s most secret scale model.
Hundreds of civilian and military employees at the Pentagon have spent time today gawking at a temporary display that includes the tabletop model of the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan that bin Laden used as his hideout for five years. The compound itself no longer exists as the Pakistani government ordered that it be razed to the ground shortly after the raid last May.
Under a glass canopy is a model built by National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) model makers who used overhead satellite imagery to create a 3-D view of the compound in painstaking detail. The agency manages the network of intelligence gathering satellites and distributes that information throughout the national security apparatus.
A NGA fact sheet vaguely refers to the model as having “traveled extensively, including to the White House for use at senior-level briefings.”
As the intelligence community began to suspect that bin Laden might be hiding out in the compound the model was built to help President Obama and the limited number of top officials briefed on his potential whereabouts so they could visualize what they were seeing on satellite photos.
Built over the span of six weeks the styrofoam model was made to scale and shows the walls and infrastructure inside the compound’s walls. Every shrub and piece of ivy lining the walls seen in the satellite pictures is accurately represented in the model. The model’s scaling is one inch represents 7 feet.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
I sure wish they’d stop releasing info on methods. It would probably save some lives in the future.
Yes I know they arent new. I still wish they’d stop talking about methods.
Overhead imagery of sufficient detail to build such a model is available commercially, and anyone who has done “sandbox exercises” in the Army or the Corps knows the value of a good model for planning purposes.
As to how much BETTER our satellites, etc are. . . no clue, and don’t care to speculate. THAT would be a “loose lips sink ships” type of thing. . .
What part of ‘stop talking about methods’ is so hard to understand?
If you use a magnifier, you can see B. Hussein Obama himself strangling Bin Laden with his manly hands.
What part of “common sense” and commercially-available data don’t YOU understand ???
We built models of places and battle dioramas in high school. . . .
I said methods, not google earth sport.
Pal, I’m a geologist. You can buy commercial sat imagery of just about anywhere on the planet, at 15cm resolution, online, with a credit card. I use DigitalGlobe, but for my needs, half-meter resolution is fine. . .
No you’re a sport who doesn’t understand what methods means and wants to argue about meaningless trivia that everyone knows.
Does the Pentagon have a public tour? Has anyone taken it, and would you recommend it?
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