Tag Archives | Osama Bin Laden

Osama bin Laden’s Personal Notes and Letters To Be Declassified on Thursday

By on May 1, 2012 in News 5

Combating Terrorism CenterThis will be interesting to check out Thursday (but I guess the press has already gotten wind of what is in the documents). Osama bin Laden reads like a troubled CEO who was frustrated by the lack of new talent and struggling with a failing brand. Brian Bennett writes in the LA Times:

Osama bin Laden’s personal notes and letters, which were seized a year ago in the U.S. raid on his compound in Pakistan, show a leader removed from day-to-day operations of the terrorist organization he founded and increasingly frustrated with the new generation of managers who were rising in the ranks.

A declassified selection of the vast trove of material — large enough, officials say, to fill a college library — will be published online Thursday by the Combating Terrorism Center, a think tank at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

In correspondence with his senior leaders, Bin Laden lamented the inexperience and poor judgment shown by the rising crop of Al Qaeda leaders.

… Read the rest

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White House Releases Death Of Bin Laden Trailer

By on March 12, 2012 in News 7

Barack Obama is the president, but more importantly, he’s the star of the Barack Obama movie. You may not have been aware that his first term was being turned into an officially sanctioned documentary as it happened — here’s the minute-long teaser clip released by his reelection campaign on the killing of Osama bin Laden:

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WikiLeaked Stratfor Emails: Osama Bin Laden Wasn’t Buried At Sea

By on March 2, 2012 in News 37

osama-bin-ladenAmong the bounty unearthed by WikiLeaks, the global intelligence agency Stratfor believes that the CIA has bin Laden’s body here in the United States, Business Insider reports. No word on what they might be doing with it:

Stratfor analysts did not believe that Osama bin Laden was buried at sea, according to Stratfor emails. At 5:26 a.m. on May 2…Stratfor CEO George Friedman sent an email with the subject “[alpha] OBL” that said: “Reportedly, we took the body with us. Thank goodness.” Fred Burton, Stratfor’s vice president for intelligence, followed that up at 5:51 a.m. with an email titled “[alpha] Body bound for Dover, DE on CIA plane.”

… Read the rest

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Osama Bin Laden Compound Being Demolished in Pakistan

By on February 26, 2012 in News 7
Osama Bin Laden Compound

Photo: Sajjad Ali Qureshi (CC)

Via BBC News:

Pakistan is more than half way through its demolition of the compound where US forces killed Osama Bin Laden, in the north-western city of Abbottabad. Work began late on Saturday and bulldozers and pneumatic machinery could be heard through the night.

The al-Qaeda leader was shot dead at the compound in the garrison town on 2 May 2011. He had been hiding there for several years. No official reason for the demolition has been given.

Residents around the three-storey compound have speculated that the authorities do not want it turned into a shrine. But it is more likely that the demolition is part of a process by the government to put the whole embarrassing episode behind them, says the BBC’s Aleem Maqbool in Abbottabad.

Journalists and residents were prevented from getting too close to the compound by a ring of several hundred police and soldiers as work got under way…

Read More: BBC News… Read the rest

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The Attraction Of Conspiracy Theories

By on February 2, 2012 in News 24
Author: Sodacan (CC)

Author: Sodacan (CC)

Via ScienceDaily:

Distrust and paranoia about government has a long history, and the feeling that there is a conspiracy of elites can lead to suspicion for authorities and the claims they make. For some, the attraction of conspiracy theories is so strong that it leads them to endorse entirely contradictory beliefs, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science (published by SAGE).

People who endorse conspiracy theories see authorities as fundamentally deceptive. The conviction that the “official story” is untrue can lead people to believe several alternative theories-despite contradictions among them. “Any conspiracy theory that stands in opposition to the official narrative will gain some degree of endorsement from someone who holds a conpiracist worldview,” according to Michael Wood, Karen Douglas and Robbie Sutton of the University of Kent.

To see if conspiracy views were strong enough to lead to inconsistencies, the researchers asked 137 college students about the death of Princess Diana.

… Read the rest

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What The Government Told Gizmodo About Osama Bin Laden’s Body

By on December 19, 2011 in News 28

Amazing read. Sam Biddle writes on Gizmodo:

Months ago, I asked the Pentagon for its visual records of Osama bin Laden’s sea burial under the Freedom of Information Act. Today, I received a thick packet of No— a complete denial that any records exist. Read it.

The core of the response is this: the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, United States Special Operations Command, and the Department of the Navy all had their records searched. Nothing. Admiral Mike Mullen’s email was scanned. Nothing. The Pentagon claims not a single person aboard the USS Carl Vinson, where Bin Laden’s remains were disposed of, took a single picture. Not a single email from the ship makes reference to photo or video. Essentially: nobody in the military has evidence. So did these things ever exist? If so, they’re in a filing cabinet at the CIA, where they’ll be safe for the rest of time.

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When War is Promoted As a Remedy for Terror

By on September 17, 2011 in News 0

GeronimoAnthony Hall writes on Salem News:

In early May President Barack Obama announced his administration’s most dramatic commemoration of this, the tenth-anniversary year of the 9/11 debacle. He boasted to the world that his government had murdered in Pakistan Osama bin Laden, who the US president described as “al-Qaeda’s leader and symbol.” “The death of bin Laden,” Obama declared, “marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaeda.”

In this military operation “Geronimo” was the code name used to identify bin Laden or his impersonator. The skeletal remains of Geronimo’s head form part a key part of the Bush clan’s family lore with its deep intergenerational connection to Yale University’s Skull and Bones Society. Skull and Bones is not a myth, but its secret rituals are legendary. As is well documented, Yale’s Skull and Bones Society has been an important seeding nursery for the national security state, but especially the CIA.

… Read the rest

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The Strange Case of Benazir Bhutto’s Claims and Osama bin Laden’s Death

By on September 9, 2011 in News 7

Benazir BhuttoJennifer Briney wrote back in 2008 on Little Country Lost:

In a November 2, 2007 interview, less than two months before she would be assassinated, Benazir Bhutto was asked by reporter David Frost of Al-Jazeera English about a letter that she had sent to Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf. The letter outlined who she believed should be investigated in the event of her assassination. While giving her answer, she listed as one of the suspects a “key figure in security … a former military officer in Pakistan” who had dealings with, among others, “Omar Sheikh, the man who murdered Osama bin-Laden.”

If that name, Omar Shieikh, sounds familiar it’s because he was a key figure in some huge stories between 1999 and 2002. His full name is Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, and multiple variations of those names are used to describe him including Omar Sheikh and Saeed Sheikh. Here’s how you may have heard of him:

  • In 1999, Indian Airlines flight 814 was hijacked by Pakistani nationals.

… Read the rest

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Who–and What–Are Behind the “Official History” of the Bin Laden Raid?

By on August 22, 2011 in News 18

Osama-bin-Ladens-compound-007Russ Baker writes for WhoWhatWhy:

The establishment media just keep getting worse. They’re further and further from good, tough investigative journalism, and more prone to be pawns in complicated games that affect the public interest in untold ways. A significant recent example is The New Yorker’s vaunted August 8 exclusive on the vanquishing of Osama bin Laden.

The piece, trumpeted as the most detailed account to date of the May 1 raid in Abbottabad Pakistan, was an instant hit. “Got the chills half dozen times reading @NewYorker killing bin Laden tick tock…exquisite journalism,” tweeted the digital director of the PBS show Frontline.  The author, freelancer Nicholas Schmidle, was quickly featured on the Charlie Rose show, an influential determiner of “chattering class” opinion. Other news outlets rushed to praise the story as “exhaustive,” “utterly compelling,” and on and on.

To be sure, it is the kind of granular, heroic story that the public loves, that generates follow-up bestsellers and movie options.

… Read the rest

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