Monday, May 02, 2011

Latest: How Osama was taken out?

Top US Officials Release Details About Raid
WJBF News, May 2, 2011

We are learning new information about the military operation that ultimately killed Osama Bin Laden.

During a conference call early Monday morning Michael Vickers, the Assistant Secretary of Defense, said the small U.S. team that carried out the strike spent less that 40 minuets inside the compound where Bin Laden was hiding.

Vickers said Bin Laden, and at least three other people died in the raid, one of those killed believed to be Bin Laden’s adult son.

During the mission one of the four United States military helicopter went down due to mechanical problems, according to Vickers, that chopper was destroyed by the crew.

The call also revealed new details about the compound where Osama Bin Laden was found. Officials said the facility was extremely unique, about eight times larger than the houses around it, and had no phone or internet connectivity.

Detective Work on Courier Led to Breakthrough on Bin Laden
By MARK MAZZETTI and HELENE COOPER
NYT, May 2, 2011

A trusted courier of Osama bin Laden’s whom American spies had been hunting for years was finally located in a compound 35 miles north of the Pakistani capital, close to one of the hubs of American counterterrorism operations. The property was so secure, so large, that American officials guessed it was built to hide someone far more important than a mere courier.

What followed was eight months of painstaking intelligence work, culminating in a helicopter assault by American military and intelligence operatives that ended in the death of Bin Laden on Sunday and concluded one of history’s most extensive and frustrating manhunts.

American officials said that Bin Laden was shot in the head after he tried to resist the assault force, and that one of his sons died with him.

For nearly a decade, American military and intelligence forces had chased the specter of Bin Laden through Pakistan and Afghanistan, once coming agonizingly close and losing him in a pitched battle at Tora Bora, in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. As Obama administration officials described it, the real breakthrough came when they finally figured out the name and location of Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, whom the Qaeda chief appeared to rely on to maintain contacts with the outside world.

Detainees at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had given the courier’s pseudonym to American interrogators and said that the man was a protégé of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.

American intelligence officials said Sunday night that they finally learned the courier’s real name four years ago, but that it took another two years for them to learn the general region where he operated.

Still, it was not until August when they tracked him to the compound in Abbottabad, a medium-sized city about an hour’s drive north of Islamabad, the capital.

C.I.A. analysts spent the next several weeks examining satellite photos and intelligence reports to determine who might be living at the compound, and a senior administration official said that by September the C.I.A. had determined there was a “strong possibility” that Bin Laden himself was hiding there.

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Related:
One Twitter User Reports Live From Osama Bin Laden Raid - Mashable
A Joy Tempered by Reflection - WSJ
Osama Bin Laden death: Political implications - Washington Post

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