The beginning of the end of al-Qaeda?

By Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 4 Comments

Courtesy Peter Bergen

Peter Bergen began covering the rise of al-Qaeda long before the twin towers fell. One of the few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden, Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, and has written three books about the terrorist organization. In his latest, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and al-Qaeda, he argues that 9/11 marked the climax of al-Qaeda’s power. Bin Laden’s organization, he writes, has been in decline ever since. Bergen spoke with Maclean’s from Washington.

Q: Al-Qaeda has now lost its best recruiter and fundraiser. Is this the beginning of the end?

A: Yes. When you joined the Nazi party, you didn’t swear an oath of allegiance to Naziism; you swore a personal oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. When you join al-Qaeda, you swear an oath of allegiance to bin Laden, not to al-Qaeda or al-Qaedism. Similarly, when groups join al-Qaeda in Iraq, they swear a personal fealty to bin Laden. He’s the grand fromage of al-Qaeda and the jihadi movement. No one can replace him.

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Why Bush stayed away from Ground Zero

By John Parisella - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 6:28 PM - 23 Comments

Among the many side debates that have emerged since the death of Osama bin Laden, one has surfaced concerning George W. Bush’s refusal of an invitation by President Barack Obama to visit Ground Zero on May 5, 2011 to lay a memorial wreath. Explanations have been offered concerning Bush’s motives, but none seem sufficiently definitive to end the discussion.

In October 2009, President Bush was invited to speak in Montreal as part of a North America tour ahead of the launch of his book. I was asked to be the moderator of the event and was invited to a private one-on-one meeting with the former president before the event. Bush was friendly and gracious as we discussed the conference format. Not long into the conversation, the president emphasized two points: Continue…

Still no justice for 9/11 victims

By Julia Belluz - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Donald Weber/VII Network

There was no jubilant eruption in Abigail Carter’s Seattle home when she heard the news. While enjoying a dinner of grilled salmon and curried cauliflower with friends, her daughter Olivia screeched from her bedroom: “Mom! Osama bin Laden is dead! And everyone is celebrating. It’s so weird.” The 15-year-old couldn’t understand why people were so excited about a man’s death—even if the man in question was the mastermind behind the 9/11 plot that killed her dad, Arron Dack, a Toronto-raised vice-president of a financial software company.

In many ways, Olivia’s ambivalence is shared by family members of some of the 24 Canadians who lost their lives when the World Trade Center was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. After nearly 10 years, they say they have pretty well forgotten about bin Laden, and don’t believe his death will curb the threat of terrorism. “We may have gotten the face of the organization,” says Abigail Cater, “but the organization continues. It also doesn’t change the fact that Arron is still dead.”

In Winnipeg, Ellen Judd was flipping between news channels in search of the latest on the federal election, when the news out of Abbottabad, Pakistan, broke. “I didn’t want to look at [the joyous crowds],” says Judd, still mourning the death of her partner Christine Egan, who was in the south tower visiting her brother when the planes hit. “If we celebrate this as a military victory, we’ve missed the point.” Bin Laden’s death heightened Judd’s sense of solidarity with everyone who has been touched by the war—especially those in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “I have much more in common with the widows in Afghanistan than I do with anybody celebrating in the streets today,” she says. “They are trying to live their ordinary lives just as Chris and I were trying to do.”

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The future of al-Qaeda

By Charlie Gillis - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 7 Comments

Getty Images

In the spring of 2004, as investigators scoured mobile phone records for evidence in the Madrid train bombings, a disturbing truth about the killers began to emerge. Far from bloody-minded professionals carrying out Osama bin Laden’s orders, these suicide bombers appeared to be novices—self-radicalized warriors who believed themselves to be carrying out the al-Qaeda leader’s wishes. The closest many of them ever had come to the man was reading his polemics on a jihadist website.

This phenomenon wasn’t new. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, cells of wannabes had popped up around the world; most showed all the acumen of Wile E. Coyote hunting the Road Runner. But the coordinated assault on Madrid’s commuter rail network marked a frightening new turn for the world’s first truly global terrorist organization. With its leaders in hiding or on the run, it had managed to outsource its work to self-styled “affiliates”—from the absurdist amateurs of the so-called “Toronto 18” to the homegrown jihadis who killed 52 people by bombing the London Underground. Just when Western intelligence agencies thought they had a handle on the threat, the threat had morphed into something almost as dangerous.

This quicksilver quality had long been al-Qaeda’s key to survival. Bin Laden had assembled his following in the late 1980s from remnants of Arab volunteer brigades who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, and who shared his outrage at the Saudi royal family’s decision to allow U.S. troops on their soil during the 1990 Gulf War. Though the scion of a construction dynasty in Saudi Arabia, he was expelled from the country the next year, and quickly shifted operations to Sudan, where his organization began to live up to its name (in Arabic, al-Qaeda means “the base”).

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Bin Laden’s ruinous legacy

By Nicholas Köhler and Stephanie Findlay - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 2 Comments

In ruins: The destruction on 9/11 of the World Trace Center was bin Laden's greatest coup

The ancient Yemeni port of Aden, on the southwest tip of the Arabian Peninsula, reaches into the blue waters separating the Middle East from the Horn of Africa to form a natural harbour. Yet the safe haven for foreign ships has over the years been less than friendly to visiting foreigners. “Aden is a terrible rock, without a single blade of grass or a drop of good water,” the 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote after arriving to work in the coffee trade. It remained a desperate place even a century later, when, in the early 1990s, the United States used the city as a staging ground to service its troubled military venture across the gulf in Somalia, and as an R & R spot for soldiers due back in Mogadishu, the Somali capital.

On Dec. 29, 1992, a security guard at the swank, modern Aden Hotel spotted two men apparently fitting a bomb to the underside of a car parked in the hotel lot outside, a not unusual occurrence in wild Yemen. Seeing the guard, one man stood and was striding directly toward him when the briefcase in his hand exploded, dismembering his arm and spewing shrapnel into the guard and the man’s accomplice. Though foiled, the attack was evidently part of a broader plan: later that day, at the Goldmore Hotel, another Aden resort, an explosive device planted in a hallway closet killed a hotel worker and a 70-year-old Austrian tourist who had just sat down to eat dinner with his wife.

Yemeni police later uncovered an arsenal of weaponry associated with the plot, including 25 other explosive devices, two anti-tank mines, two machine guns and a pistol. That stash and the large quantity of cash recovered from a suspect’s apartment pointed to an operation of means and sophistication. The two bombers at the Aden Hotel, who’d survived their injuries, described attending training camps in far-flung Afghanistan operated by a still-obscure religious leader and veteran of the anti-Soviet Afghan mujahedeen campaigns. Osama bin Laden had recently run afoul of the ruling family in his native Saudi Arabia and now lived in the basketcase African nation of Sudan, raising horses, growing sunflowers and using his business acumen to fund terrorist exploits.

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Pakistani PM lashes out at critics

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 2:32 PM - 1 Comment

In a speech to the Pakistani parliament, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani denounced claims his country was either incompetent or uncooperative in the search for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. “It is disingenuous for anyone to blame Pakistan or any state institution of Pakistan…for being in cahoots with al-Qaeda,” Mr. Gilani told lawmakers. “It was al-Qaeda and its affiliates that carried out hundreds of suicide bombings in nearly every town and city of Pakistan.” The high-level military operation has put a marked strain on relations between the U.S. and Pakistan, which has accused the Americans of violating its sovereignty. Pakistani opposition leader Nisar Ali Khan asked the government to explain “how four helicopters intruded Pakistan in the dark of the night!” The comment was loudly applauded by parliamentarians. Mr. Gilani also used the address to announce an investigation into the raid by Pakistan’s military, elements of which the U.S. says helped shield bin Laden.

Wall Street Journal

Obama on Osama

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 11:38 AM - 4 Comments

In his first interview since the death of Osama bin Laden, U.S. President Barack Obama described the historic event as “one of the most satisfying weeks, not only for my presidency, but I think for the United States.” Obama told reporter Steve Kroft that he was “profoundly grateful” to be part of bringing the architect of 9/11 to justice, but that the decision to make the raid was extremely difficult, especially because he couldn’t be sure that bin Laden was in the compound. “We didn’t have a photograph of bin Laden in that building, there was no direct evidence,” he said, “but I felt that the risks were outweighed by the potential benefit of us finally getting our man.”

CBS News

The life and times of Osama bin Laden

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 12 Comments

AFP/Getty Images

The compound was neither a mansion, nor a fortress; it was a prison. For months, maybe even years, the planet’s most-wanted man hid behind its high, razor-wire topped walls, trying to obscure his presence from spies, satellites and drones. The house had no phone or Internet connections. Garbage was burned in the courtyard. And afraid of being recognized simply by his tall, skinny frame, he could not even venture outdoors.

In the end, the first real contact Osama bin Laden had with the outside world since he fled Afghanistan in December 2001 came when a team of U.S. Navy Seals touched down at his Abbottabad, Pakistan, hiding spot Sunday. Forty minutes later, he was dead—shot through the head in a bedroom, his blood spreading across a shabby oriental carpet.

The 54-year-old’s death came as he had often predicted, from the barrel of an American gun. Perhaps he even welcomed it. “I’m fighting so I can die a martyr and go to heaven to meet God,” bin Laden once told Al-Quds Al-Arabi, a British-based Arabic language newspaper. “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the difference between us two,” he proclaimed on another occasion. And few, in the West at least, will term it anything but justice. Author of deadly bombings in East Africa and Yemen, the Saudi-born scion of a multi-millionaire construction magnate had been at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list since 1998. Then on Sept. 11, 2001, he dispatched teams of hijackers to fly passenger jets into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, murdering 2,933 people. (Forty more died when a fourth plane was brought down in a Pennsylvania field, short of another presumed Washington target.) The fires set that day still burn across the globe.

For a decade now, Osama bin Laden has been the object of our fascination and the repository of our fears. Academics and the press have parsed his hidey-hole communiqués looking for an ideology or explanation. Booksellers’ shelves are crammed with dozens of biographies and oral histories, purporting to deliver the “inside” story of his and al-Qaeda’s rise. Yet the motives, life and now death of a figure destined to go down as one of history’s greatest villains remain muddled.

Some accounts of the bedroom firefight say a woman tried to shield bin Laden with her body. The Americans think it was his wife, although which one, or even how many he had (some sources suggest four, others five) is a mystery. The same for a son reportedly left dead in the compound—one of his 13, or 19, or maybe 23 children. The fate of the terrorist leader’s body, spirited away and said to have been buried at sea, is already the subject of conspiracy theories. Osama’s violent demise may offer “sober satisfaction,” as Stephen Harper put it, but it won’t end the questions. Killing the myth may prove even harder than killing the man.

The date and place of Osama’s birth—March 10, 1957, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia—are clear. But not so much the circumstances. As one of the 52, or maybe 54, offspring that Muhammad bin-Awad bin Laden sired with his 22 wives, perhaps that’s understandable. The elder bin Laden emigrated to the kingdom around 1930. A porter in his native Yemen, he found a new calling in construction, building a palace on the cheap for King Abdel Aziz ibn Saud and securing a lifelong patron. Lucrative contracts for roads and bridges followed, as well as prestigious commissions to renovate Islam’s holiest sites in Medina and Mecca. By the time of Osama’s birth, Muhammad was among the country’s wealthiest men. But he remained renowned for his piety—praying at three different mosques each day, never having more than four wives at one time in accordance with religious law, and renovating the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem at cost. He was also a fierce believer in the prevailing Arab cause. In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War with Israel, Osama once told an interviewer, Muhammad tried to have his company’s 200 bulldozers converted to tanks so he could launch his own invasion.

He had met Osama’s mother, Alia, during a visit to Syria in the mid-1950s. The marriage—his 10th—lasted only a few years and produced just the one child. By some family accounts, Alia was more of a concubine than wife. In others, she was a headstrong and sophisticated woman who demanded a divorce and adopted Western dress when outside the country. What is certain is that Osama adored her. “First comes God and then his mother,” Osama’s half-brother Ahmad Muhammad al-Attas told journalists in the months after 9/11. During his years of exile in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, bin Laden made a point of calling her frequently, even though security officials at home and in the U.S. were surely monitoring the calls.

Osama’s relationship with Muhammad, who died in a September 1967 plane crash, was not as close. One friend claims bin Laden only met his father five times. But he was accepted by his many half-siblings, and given an inheritance—shares in the family firm that were worth somewhere between US$8 million and $250 million, according to widely divergent accounts. Whatever the amount, he didn’t do much with it. Compatriots remember him as a quiet kid, who enjoyed picnics and soccer games, and had one notable passion—horseback riding.

While many of his brothers and sisters travelled and studied abroad, Osama preferred to stay in Saudi Arabia. There have been reports that he once travelled to Sweden as a teen, and Chicago as a young adult, but the only confirmed voyages were annual visits to Syria to see his mother’s family. As a student at the prestigious al-Thager Model School in Jeddah—where the royal family educates its boys—he was considered passably bright. In 1978, he entered King Abdul Aziz University to study economics, management and business administration. Already married and the father of two boys—he had wed his 14-year-old first cousin, Najwa, when he was 17—he didn’t stick at school for long, and was soon back working for the family firm. But what bin Laden did discover during his brief post-secondary career was his first spiritual mentor, a Palestinian firebrand named Abdullah Azzam. A follower of the Muslim Brotherhood, Azzam was a deep believer in the concept of jihad. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the religious scholar issued his own fatwa, declaring it every Muslim’s duty to join the struggle.

Soon after, Azzam left Saudi Arabia for the border regions of Pakistan to minister to the mujahedeen. Bin Laden followed. Some sources suggest the two men worked together raising money and setting up training camps for the fighters. Others like Michael Scheur, in his recent biography of the terrorist leader, claim Osama spent five years doing the bidding of Saudi intelligence, using his family’s equipment to build hospitals and cut roads through the border mountains to ease arms deliveries. By the time they officially set up a joint operation in 1984—the Maktab al-Khadamat (services office)—to welcome foreign fighters, bin Laden had become a recognized force in his own right, possessed with the kind of confidence that made men follow. “He was a natural leader,” Khalid al-Batarfi, a friend, told Peter Bergen, the author of The Osama I Know. “He leads by example and by hints more than direct orders. He just sets an example and then expects you to follow and somehow you follow even if you are not 100 per cent convinced.”

In 1986, bin Laden set up al-Masadah (the Lion’s Den), his own training camp for Arab recruits in the mountains. But the man who was teaching others to fight had yet to see action. In the spring of 1987, the base—garrisoned by 50 or so fighters—came under attack from a much larger Soviet force. According to some accounts, the mujahedeen held out for a great victory. In others, they suffered heavy losses and retreated in disarray. For years afterwards, Osama was always pictured holding a Kalashnikov rifle he claimed to have taken away from a Russian he killed in hand-to-hand combat that week. As reports of the battle spread, his prestige grew. In the following weeks, he and other foreign commanders met to form a loose alliance of jihadis, which would ultimately morph into al-Qaeda. It was the beginning of bin Laden’s legend.

The FBI’s wanted poster is scant on details. “Usama” bin Laden is listed as between six foot four and six foot six and “approximately” 160 lb. His languages are Arabic and “probably” Pashtu. (What is not noted is that he also studied English in high school.) There are no known scars and marks. He is left-handed, walks with a cane, and has used the aliases the Sheik, the Prince, the Emir and the Director. But as of the morning of May 2, one hard fact had been added: the label “deceased” under his picture.

The emerging narrative of his death suggests the $25 million reward the United States government has been dangling for his “apprehension or conviction” played no role in the Abbottabad raid. So too the Pakistani authorities, who managed not to respond to a helicopter assault and lengthy gun battle at a compound located just a kilometre away from their chief officer-training school, the Kakul military academy, and nearby several other bases.

Official links to bin Laden have always been a touchy subject. In addition to Saudi support during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, it has long been reported he and his men also received training and arms from the CIA. Certainly he was once—and given his final location, almost assuredly still— friendly with elements of the Pakistani intelligence service.

In 1989, when the 32-year-old returned home to Jeddah after the Russian withdrawal, he was considered a hero. There were talks with Prince Turki Al Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence, about overthrowing the Communists in Yemen—although the prince ultimately decided that such a war would be a little too close to home. In August 1990, when Iraq invaded neighbouring Kuwait, bin Laden offered his services and followers to defend the kingdom in the event that Saddam pushed on. He was turned down.

Osama’s rift with the West is often attributed to his anger over the garrisoning of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia in preparation for the first Gulf War, a supposed “desecration” of Islam’s holiest sites. But he had already begun formulating a vision of global jihadism back in Afghanistan, working closely with a new mentor, the Egyptian radical Ayman al-Zawahiri. In 1991, his anti-government proclamations became too much for the Saudis and he was asked to leave the country. He made his way to Sudan, where a hardline Islamic regime had seized power in 1989. Still, in those days he was hardly considered a global threat. In Khartoum, he operated in the open as a businessman, building roads for the government and importing medical equipment and supplies. It was Zawahiri and his continued attacks on Egyptian targets that drew the most attention. His friend bin Laden was considered to be a sympathizer, and perhaps financier.

At the behest of the Saudi government, friends and family continued to visit Osama in Sudan, trying to convince him to sever ties with his former Afghan comrades. At one point he supposedly mused about resigning from al-Qaeda to pursue life as a watermelon and peanut farmer. But in 1994, the bin Laden family found it necessary to take out advertisements in Saudi newspapers officially disowning Osama. (Although money continued to flow his way, and relatives travelled to see him in Afghanistan as late as January 2001 for the wedding of his son, Mohammed.) The Saudi government stripped him of his citizenship and he replied with an open letter calling for the royal family’s violent overthrow.

It was the actions of Zawahiri’s followers, including a 1995 suicide bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, which killed 17, that eventually got the pair expelled from Sudan. In May 1996, bin Laden chartered a private jet and flew to Kandahar, where he was greeted with open arms by the Taliban and its leader, Mullah Omar.

Al-Qaeda’s early Afghan days were idyllic, according to some. Followers, including Toronto’s Khadr family, congregated at a rough compound near Jalalabad. In their retelling, Osama was more like a sitcom dad than the father of a global terrorist movement. “He’s a normal human being,” Abdurahman Khadr told the CBC in 2004. “He has issues with his wife and his kids. Financial issues, you know. The kids aren’t listening. The kids aren’t doing this and that.” His sister Zaynab recalled a man who loved horseback riding, playing volleyball, and target shooting with the kids. Although he seemed a little strict, even by radical fundamentalist standards. The female bin Ladens “have lots of restrictions, where they go, when they go, where they come, when they come, who visits them and how long they can stay in their house and all that,” Zaynab explained.

Osama also harboured some prejudices against creature comforts, forbidding his family from having running water, electricity, or even using ice. “He is against drinking cold water,” said Abdurahman. “He didn’t want them in any way to be spoiled.” Conspicuous non-consumption was a bit of an obsession for the rich Saudi. In the stifling heat of Khartoum, he refused to install air conditioning. “We want a simple life,” was one of his mantras.

What bin Laden didn’t seem to shy away from was publicity. In the late 1990s, as his fame as a terrorist grew, he gave regular interviews to foreign journalists, and even held a press conference with Zawahiri in 1998 to announce the formation of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Crusaders and Jews. A few months later, al-Qaeda staged its first major operation, bombing the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 224. President Bill Clinton responded by firing more than 100 cruise missiles at bin Laden’s Afghan camps, but al-Qaeda’s leadership escaped unscathed. The Taliban, already internationally isolated, resisted UN sanctions and blandishments like a $5-million reward, and refused to hand the Saudi over. But they didn’t necessarily enjoy the grandstanding. Even long-time bin Laden deputies like Abu Musab al-Suri (captured in 2005 and sent to a secret Syrian prison) found it all a bit much. “I think our brother has caught the disease of screens, flashes, fans and applause,” he wrote in 1999.

It took a good long while for the Americans to figure out that they had missed their chance to kill bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora in December 2001. The ferocious assault by Afghan tribal militias, backed by U.S. and British war planes, killed more than 100 al-Qaeda fighters, including 18 commanders. Foreign troops, Canadians among them, returned to the scene several times over the following months, looking in vain for the corpses of Osama and Zawahiri. Eventually the CIA obtained a videotape of Osama hiking through the mountains into Pakistan and realized just how close they had come. It showed a U.S. plane dropping a bomb on the caves. “We were there last night,” remarks bin Laden.

Audio tapes from the al-Qaeda leader would surface occasionally. (By 2010 there were more than 40 authenticated messages.) In October 2004, he appeared in a video, looking disturbingly robust and well-groomed. After George W. Bush won re-election, nothing was heard from bin Laden for more than three years. Many speculated that he had been killed in a drone attack, or died from a medical condition, like his supposed kidney diseases. All the time, the hunt—and the wars that flowed out of it—went on.

The secret U.S. commando organization responsible for the terrorist’s assassination, the Joint Special Operations Command, has a budget of more than $1 billion a year. But that’s a drop in the bucket compared to an Afghan campaign that has cost more than $450 billion since 2001, and a loosely related invasion and occupation of Iraq that is closing in on $800 billion. Still, in the afterglow of bin Laden’s killing, which sent euphoric crowds into the streets of Washington, New York and other cities, many will say the expense and effort were worth it.

However, eliminating the face of terror doesn’t rid any of us of the problem. Footage of the Abbottabad compound show a large satellite dish which surely enabled bin Laden to follow the deadly exploits of his followers, clones and imitators around the world.

One can only hope that he found channel surfing much less pleasurable in his final months, as Arabs throughout the Middle East took to the streets to rise up against their dictators. Not in violent jihad, as bin Laden has envisioned, but in largely peaceful protests demanding rights, reform and democracy.

History will record that when revolution finally came to the region it was inspired by a simple Tunisian fruit-seller, Mohammed Bouazizi, who set himself ablaze to protest government corruption and indifference—an unwanted man who may end up having far more influence than the world’s foremost fugitive.

Why did it take so long to get Osama?

By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Darren McCollester/New York Times/Getty Images

In the end, Osama bin Laden was hardly the righteous martyr he claimed to be. The same terrorist mastermind who murdered thousands of people in a single morning—and urged his followers to “kill Americans wherever they are found,” even if that meant their own demise—was not exactly toughing out the jihad in a dusty cave or secluded mud hut. He was holed up in a Pakistani mansion, in a third-floor bedroom with a king-size mattress, red-and-yellow curtains, and a closet.

John Brennan, the White House’s counterterrorism adviser, summed it up best: “Here is Osama, living in a million-dollar compound,” he told reporters. “It speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.”

Snippets continue to emerge about the top-secret mission that finally claimed al-Qaeda’s elusive leader, 10 long years after the 9/11 attacks. The tips from Guantánamo Bay. Months and months of tedious surveillance. The dangerous midnight raid, carried out by an elite unit of Navy Seals—and relayed, blow by blow, to nervous officials back in the White House situation room, including President Barack Obama.

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How did Pakistan not know bin Laden was hiding there?

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Saturday, May 7, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 10 Comments

Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

The discovery of Osama bin Laden, not in some desolate cave in a lawless tribal borderland, but ensconced comfortably in a suburban neighbourhood in the heart of Pakistan, has led to a single burning question in Washington: how could the Pakistani government, recipient of billions of dollars of American aid, not know that for possibly five years America’s most wanted fugitive was living in plain sight, a short walk from a military academy, no less?

For years, Pakistan denied knowledge of his whereabouts, even while the Pakistani intelligence services stood accused of tipping off al-Qaeda’s leaders about American efforts to find them. Anybody who thought that Pakistan was protecting bin Laden was “smoking something they shouldn’t be smoking,” Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, told CNN in 2010.

But those suspicions about Islamabad turned to outrage this week. Relations had already been sharply deteriorating, with the U.S. accusing Pakistan of not being serious in fighting terror—and Pakistanis outraged over U.S. drone attacks against suspected Pakistani terrorist targets. Now, with the news that bin Laden had been living openly in Pakistan, there were calls in Washington for Congress to limit an aid program that has allotted US$7.5 billion over five years to help strengthen the Pakistani government and win the support of Pakistan’s people. “I think this tells us once again that unfortunately Pakistan, at times, is playing a double game, and that’s very troubling to me,” said Susan Collins, the top Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee. “We clearly need to keep the pressure on Pakistan, and one way to do that is to put more strings attached to the tremendous amount of military aid that we give the country,” she said.

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Why did they bury bin Laden at sea?

By Erica Alini - Saturday, May 7, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 42 Comments

Jason DeCrow/AP

On May 2, shortly after 1 a.m., Osama bin Laden’s body was washed and wrapped in cloth on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson. A military officer read out prayers, his voice closely echoed by an Arabic translator. A few moments later, the bundle was eased into the north Arabian Sea. A rather dignified—albeit inglorious—end for the world’s most wanted man.

Judging from Pentagon briefings, the handling of bin Laden’s burial was as smooth an operation as the 40 minutes of action that led to his killing. The decision to dispose of the body at sea, experts say, came out of a concern that a gravesite might become a shrine to the terrorist who masterminded the 9/11 attacks. Besides, U.S. officials said, no country seemed eager to become the final resting place for bin Laden’s remains. Even his native Saudi Arabia is reported to have refused to accept what was left of him.

And though the decision to dispose of him at sea was dictated by pragmatism, according to the official narrative, the burial did not neglect cultural sensitivity. Though Muslims usually lay their dead to rest in the ground with the head pointed toward the holy city of Mecca, U.S. officials say that bin Laden’s body was washed and shrouded according to the Islamic rite, and the burial occurred less than 24 hours after death, as prescribed by tradition.

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How do you feel about the U.S. operation that killed Osama bin Laden?

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 3:54 PM - 40 Comments

How Osama bin Laden was hidden in plain sight

By Adnan R. Khan - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 20 Comments

DigitalGlobe/Getty Images

It was around midnight on Sunday night when Naveed’s house suddenly went black. The 24-year-old student thought little of it—Pakistanis have gotten used to power cuts over the past few years as the country struggles with an energy crisis—but it was an odd time for it. Load shedding, as it’s commonly called here, happens on a schedule, and this blackout was not on schedule.

Out on the quiet streets of the Kakul neighbourhood in Abbottabad, nothing seemed amiss. Nothing ever happened in Kakul, which was part of the reason Naveed had gone to Britain to study: he needed to get away from the boredom of living in a part of the city officially under military control—a cantonment zone—where residents were required to report regularly to the army about who lives where, and intelligence officers regularly harassed people they deemed suspicious. He felt suffocated.

Being back at home, he was again feeling the walls closing in on him, and the darkness only made it worse. Stepping onto the roof of his family home, he breathed in the cool mountain air. The smooth, rolling silhouette of the Himalayan foothills to the east had a calming effect, as it always had, so when he heard the dull thump of helicopter blades, he was taken a little by surprise.

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Al-Qaeda confirms bin Laden death

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 12:30 PM - 5 Comments

Al-Qaeda released a statement Friday confirming the death of Osama bin Laden, five days after U.S. President Barack Obama announced that Navy SEAL commandos had found and shot bin Laden in a raid on his Abbottabad compound. The Islamist militant group referred to their former leader as a martyr and vowed revenge on the U.S. and its allies, including Pakistan.

Montreal Gazette

Bin Laden the movie star?

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 6, 2011 at 11:15 AM - 3 Comments

Jonathan Olley/Summit Entertainment/AP

Kathryn Bigelow may be glad her next movie is tentatively titled Kill Bin Laden. The independent film, which Bigelow has been trying to finance and cast as a follow-up to her Oscar-winning war drama The Hurt Locker, is said to focus on one of the U.S.’s failed attempts to take out the al-Qaeda mastermind. And according to Variety, the special forces unit she focuses on is “the very team that wound up killing the terrorist leader.” Literally overnight, the project is one of the “timeliest movies in Hollywood,” writes Deadline’s Mike Fleming.

It has company, though, since other studios have Osama bin Laden ideas languishing in development hell. Paramount has the rights to Jawbreaker, a book about how the U.S. let bin Laden escape at Tora Bora in December 2001. The studio has gone through several drafts of the script, including one Oliver Stone was attached to. Paramount even considered featuring Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character in the hunt for public enemy No. 1.

Considering these projects were all developed when it seemed the U.S. would never catch bin Laden, the latest news out of Abbottabad, Pakistan, will undoubtedly alter the plots—or at least the endings. The Hollywood Reporter said that Bigelow and her Hurt Locker writer, Mark Boal, are “digesting the news and will spend the week figuring out their next move.”

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Mulcair backtracks on bin Laden comments

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 3:10 PM - 22 Comments

NDP Deputy Leader Thomas Mulcair has backtracked after telling a CBC host on Wednesday he doesn’t believe the U.S. has photos of a dead Osama bin Laden. Mulcair was back on the CBC Thursday to clarify his comments. He now says he doesn’t doubt the photos exist, and blames post-election “fatigue” for the gaffe.

CBC News

What's on bin Laden's Hard Drive?

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 1:26 PM - 6 Comments

“The mother lode of intelligence.”

That’s how a U.S. official, speaking anonymously with Politico, described the cache of computers and thumb drives Navy SEALS seized from Osama Bin Laden’s Abbotabad crib. Former State Department official Richard Haas told the Toronto Star that this “intelligence harvest” could be “as important if not more important than the actual killing of bin Laden.”

He may be speaking too soon. Remember—OBL was careful enough to forego both phone lines and an Internet hookup to his compound. Assuming he was still active in al-Qaeda communications over the past few years, he would have had to physically hustle USB keys and hard drives in and out of his bunker. If he was that careful, wouldn’t he take the precaution of encrypting his communications as well?

As The Register speculates, such encryption might nevertheless be cracked by the US military—especially if Bin Laden used al-Qaeda’s homebrew scrambler “Mojahedeen Secrets” (no joke).

As tantalizing as the data seizure may be to the hundreds of intelligence agents poring over the drives right now, all involved may want to temper their expectations. We’ve yet to receive any indication that bin Laden has been doing anything but cowering in recent years, and it’s entirely possible that he’s completely out of the jihadi loop.

Given the recent discovery of pungent weed crops by the Abbotabad compound and reports of frequent munchie-runs by OBL’s cronies, America’s best data-crackers may find nothing on the drives but a copy of Super Smash Brothers PC and a badly dubbed torrent of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Head of Anglican Church criticizes Osama killing

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 12:27 PM - 34 Comments

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the head of the Anglican Church, told the media on Thursday he felt “very uncomfortable” over the killing of Osama bin Laden. “I think the killing of an unarmed man is always going to leave a very uncomfortable feeling because it doesn’t look as if justice is seen to be done,” Williams said at a press briefing commenting on the U.S. raid that lead to bin Laden’s death. Williams also took aim at the contradictory accounts the Obama administration has been giving of the way in which the al-Qaeda leader’s died in Abbottabad, Pakistan. “In those circumstances,” he added, “I think it’s also true that the different versions of events that have emerged in recent days have not done a great deal to help.”

AFP

Osama bin Laden: the evolving account of what happened that night

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 5:42 AM - 12 Comments

Sunday

Intense firefight lasting 45 minutes. Bin Laden engaged in said firefight. Used wife as human shield. Wife killed. Bin Laden ultimately shot fatally in head by Navy SEALS in close-quarters gun battle.

 • • •

Monday

Pretty intense firefight “throughout the operation.” SEALS faced “heavy fire from [those] in the house.” No human shield – bin Laden’s wife wounded after being shot in leg while lunging at U.S. forces. Bin Laden himself unarmed; shot in head while potentially reaching for a rifle or explosives.

 • • •

Wednesday

“Firefight” consisted of Navy SEALS being shot at by bin Laden courier in the guest house. Courier quickly killed, as was Osama’s brother, whom SEALS “believed was preparing to fire a weapon.” Osama bin Laden shot in head while standing in room where an AK-47 and a pistol were “in arm’s reach.”

 • • •

Next Monday

No bullets fired at U.S. forces, but Navy SEALS pretty certain that bin Laden’s courier shot them a dirty look. U.S. forces engaged no fewer than Continue…

Mulcair

By Paul Wells - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 12:08 AM - 78 Comments

I wouldn’t contrive a defence of Tom Mulcair, the NDP’s deputy leader, if I thought he’d said something truly lunatic. I’d be likelier to make some popcorn and enjoy the show. But I’ve heard chatter to the effect that he seems, in this interview, to be denying that Osama bin Laden was actually shot the other night outside Islamabad by U.S. forces. (This story includes some Twitter traffic along the same lines.) That would be fake-moon-landing loony — but while it would certainly be entertaining, I don’t think that’s what Mulcair is saying. (Evan Solomon missed a chance to ask the clear question — “Are you saying the Americans didn’t kill bin Laden?” — perhaps because Mulcair’s first answer opened up vistas of possible weird that Evan wasn’t quite prepared to navigate.)

As I understand it, Mulcair is accusing the White House of wanting to release as little information about what went on in that villa as possible, because it’s not clear whether the terrorist leader died in the crossfire of a firefight or was simply executed. There would be international-law implications if the latter, but I’m out of my depth in discussing those. What is clear is that the White House’s story has changed in unflattering ways. You may find it outrageous enough that he’s saying the White House would claim to have evidence it doesn’t have. I do wish there were no precedent for such a thing.

I’m pretty sure bin Laden is dead, that US soldiers did the deed, that they took photos as part of a meticulously planned operation, and that the President doesn’t want to release them for reasons I find mostly decent. I take Mulcair to be agreeing with the first two assertions and contesting the third and fourth. Your mileage may vary.

Did torture nab bin Laden?

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 12:35 PM - 14 Comments

No.

Pakistan condemns unilateral U.S. action against bin Laden

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 3, 2011 at 2:06 PM - 12 Comments

Facing internal criticism about the fact that a secret U.S. kill-mission was allowed to take place on Pakistani soil, Pakistan’s foreign ministry expressed “deep concern” over the operation on Tuesday. “This event of unauthorized unilateral action cannot be taken as a rule,” the foreign ministry said in a statement about the death of Osama Bin Laden. At the same time, Pakistan, a major recipient of U.S. aid, is taking credit for its role in the terrorist leader’s capture. The written statement claims that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) tipped-off the CIA about foreigners in Abbottabad in 2009.

Washington Post

Osama's will

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 3, 2011 at 12:36 PM - 3 Comments

A Kuwaiti newspaper has obtained what it claims is Osama bin Laden’s will, written December 14, 2001, when he was on the run from the U.S. in Afghanistan. In the will, bin Laden takes credit for most of his achievements in terrorism, culminating in the 9/11 attacks. He also orders his wives not to re-marry after he’s dead. Perhaps surprisingly, he admonishes his children not to join al-Qaeda or join “the front” in the war against the West. Instead he “expresses regret to his children” for not having spent enough time with them because he was too busy working at his jihad job.

The Guardian

Strange links between bin Laden’s death and Harry Potter films

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 3, 2011 at 11:59 AM - 5 Comments

After Osama bin Laden’s death, Hollywood movie makers are seeking for a way to put his story on screen, but the first film to benefit might actually be “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” the final in the Harry Potter series, which is set to come out on July 15. According to Hollywood Reporter, the entire Potter saga (books and movies) have inevitably been coloured by the events of 9/11: although the first of seven volumes was published in England in 1997, the first film was released in November 2001, just weeks after 9/11, and set up a conflict between a young, orphaned wizard who slowly develops his powers, and Lord Voldemort, committed to his destruction. Voldemort is a “formless boogie-man,” somewhat shrouded in mystery like Osama, who then takes on more physical presence until the last volume, when he and Harry go head-to-head. In 2004, a poster on mugglenet.com compared the Death Eaters in the Harry Potter series to al Qaeda. The Potter movie is set to be one of the biggest movies of the summer, but Hollywood Reporter predicts bin Laden’s death will give it extra emotional resonance, and maybe even more dollars at the box office.

Reuters