Frogs Ahoy!

Members Login
Username 
 
Password 
    Remember Me  
Post Info TOPIC: New York Times Article on the Navy Seal raid that killed bin Laden


Senior Member

Status: Offline
Posts: 385
Date:
New York Times Article on the Navy Seal raid that killed bin Laden


Clues Gradually Led to the Location of Qaeda Chief
2011-05-03 01:41:32.161 GMT


(New York Times) -- WASHINGTON — For years, the agonizing
search for Osama bin Laden kept coming up empty. Then last July,
Pakistanis working for the Central Intelligence Agency drove up
behind a white Suzuki navigating the bustling streets near
Peshawar, Pakistan, and wrote down the car’s license plate.
The man in the car was Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, and
over the next month C.I.A. operatives would track him throughout
central Pakistan. Ultimately, administration officials said, he
led them to a sprawling compound at the end of a long dirt road
and surrounded by tall security fences in a wealthy hamlet 35
miles from the Pakistani capital.
On a moonless night eight months later, 79 American
commandos in four helicopters descended on the compound, the
officials said. Shots rang out. A helicopter stalled and would
not take off. Pakistani authorities, kept in the dark by their
allies in Washington, scrambled jets as the American commandos
rushed to finish their mission and leave before a confrontation.
Of the five dead, one was a tall, bearded man with a bloodied
face and a bullet in his head. A member of the Navy Seals snapped
his picture with a camera and uploaded it to analysts who fed it
into a facial recognition program.
And just like that, history’s most expansive, expensive and
exasperating manhunt was over. The inert frame of Osama bin
Laden, America’s enemy No. 1, was placed in a helicopter for
burial at sea, never to be seen or feared again. A nation that
spent a decade tormented by its failure to catch the man
responsible for nearly 3,000 fiery deaths in New York, Washington
and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, at long last had its sense of
finality, at least in this one difficult chapter.
For an intelligence community that had endured searing
criticism for a string of intelligence failures over the past
decade, Bin Laden’s killing brought a measure of redemption. For
a military that has slogged through two, and now three vexing
wars in Muslim countries, it provided an unalloyed success. And
for a president whose national security leadership has come under
question, it proved an affirming moment that will enter the
history books.
The raid was the culmination of years of painstaking
intelligence work, including the interrogation of C.I.A.
detainees in secret prisons in Eastern Europe, where sometimes
what was not said was as useful as what was. Intelligence
agencies eavesdropped on telephone calls and e-mails of the
courier’s Arab family in a Persian Gulf state and pored over
satellite images of the compound in Abbottabad to determine a
“pattern of life” that might decide whether the operation would
be worth the risk.
As more than a dozen White House, intelligence and Pentagon
officials described the operation on Monday, the past few weeks
were a nerve-racking amalgamation of what-ifs and negative
scenarios. “There wasn’t a meeting when someone didn’t mention
Black Hawk Down,” a senior administration official said,
referring to the disastrous 1993 battle in Somalia in which two
American helicopters were shot down and some of their crew killed
in action. The failed mission to rescue hostages in Iran in 1979
also loomed large.
Administration officials split over whether to launch the
operation, whether to wait and continue monitoring until they
were more sure that Bin Laden was really there, or whether to go
for a less risky bombing assault. In the end, Mr. Obama opted
against a bombing that could do so much damage it might be
uncertain whether Bin Laden was really hit and chose to send in
commandos. A “fight your way out” option was built into the plan,
with two helicopters following the two main assault copters as
backup in case of trouble.
On Sunday afternoon, as the helicopters raced over Pakistani
territory, the president and his advisers gathered in the
Situation Room of the White House to monitor the operation as it
unfolded. Much of the time was spent in silence. Mr. Obama looked
“stone faced,” one aide said. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
fingered his rosary beads. “The minutes passed like days,”
recalled John O. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief.
The code name for Bin Laden was “Geronimo.” The president
and his advisers watched Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, on
a video screen, narrating from his agency’s headquarters across
the Potomac River what was happening in far-away Pakistan.
“They’ve reached the target,” he said.
Minutes passed.
“We have a visual on Geronimo,” he said.
A few minutes later: “Geronimo EKIA.”
Enemy Killed In Action. There was silence in the Situation
Room.
Finally, the president spoke up.
“We got him.”
Filling in the Gaps
Years before the Sept. 11 attacks transformed Bin Laden
into the world’s most feared terrorist, the C.I.A. had begun
compiling a detailed dossier about the major players inside his
global terror network.
It wasn’t until after 2002, when the agency began rounding
up Qaeda operatives — and subjecting them to hours of brutal
interrogation sessions in secret overseas prisons — that they
finally began filling in the gaps about the foot soldiers,
couriers and money men Bin Laden relied on.
Prisoners in American custody told stories of a trusted
courier. When the Americans ran the man’s pseudonym past two
top-level detainees — the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks,
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; and Al Qaeda’s operational chief, Abu
Faraj al-Libi — the men claimed never to have heard his name.
That raised suspicions among interrogators that the two detainees
were lying and that the courier probably was an important figure.
As the hunt for Bin Laden continued, the spy agency was
being buffeted on other fronts: the botched intelligence
assessments about weapons of mass destruction leading up to the
Iraq War, and the intense criticism for using waterboarding and
other extreme interrogation methods that critics said amounted to
torture.
By 2005, many inside the C.I.A. had reached the conclusion
that the Bin Laden hunt had grown cold, and the agency’s top
clandestine officer ordered an overhaul of the agency’s
counterterrorism operations. The result was Operation Cannonball,
a bureaucratic reshuffling that placed more C.I.A. case officers
on the ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
With more agents in the field, the C.I.A. finally got the
courier’s family name. With that, they turned to one of their
greatest investigative tools — the National Security Agency began
intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages between the
man’s family and anyone inside Pakistan. From there they got his
full name.
Last July, Pakistani agents working for the C.I.A. spotted
him driving his vehicle near Peshawar. When, after weeks of
surveillance, he drove to the sprawling compound in Abbottabad,
American intelligence operatives felt they were onto something
big, perhaps even Bin Laden himself. It was hardly the spartan
cave in the mountains that many had envisioned as his hiding
place. Rather, it was a three-story mansion ringed by
12-foot-high concrete walls, topped with barbed wire and
protected by two security fences.
Back in Washington, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta,
met with Mr. Obama and his most senior national security aides,
including Mr. Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. The meeting was considered
so secret that White House officials didn’t even list the
topic in their alerts to each other.
That day, Mr. Panetta spoke at length about Bin Laden and
his presumed hiding place.
“It was electric,” an administration official who attended
the meeting said. “For so long, we’d been trying to get a handle
on this guy. And all of a sudden, it was like, wow, there he is.”
Still, there was still guesswork about whether Bin Laden was
indeed inside the mansion. What followed was weeks of tense
meetings between Mr. Panetta and his subordinates about what to
do next.
While Mr. Panetta advocated an aggressive strategy, to
confirm Bin Laden’s presence, some C.I.A. clandestine officers
worried that the most promising lead in years might be blown if
bodyguards suspected the compound was being watched and spirited
the Qaeda leader out of the area.
For weeks last fall, spy satellites took detailed
photographs, and the N.S.A. worked to scoop up any communications
coming from the mansion. It wasn’t easy: the compound had neither
a phone line nor internet access. Those inside were so concerned
about security that they burned their trash rather than put it on
the street for collection.
In February, Mr. Panetta called Vice Admiral William H.
McRaven, commander of the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations
Command, to C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., to give him
details about the compound and to begin planning a military
strike.
Admiral McRaven, a veteran of the covert world who had
written a book on American Special Operations, spent weeks
working with the C.I.A. on the operation, and came up with three
options: a helicopter assault using American commandos, a strikes
with B-2 bombers that would obliterate the compound, or a joint
raid with Pakistani intelligence operatives who would be told
about the mission hours before the launch.
Weighing the Options
On March 14, Mr. Panetta brought the options to the White
House. C.I.A. officials had been taking satellite photos,
establishing what Mr. Panetta described as the habits of people
living at the compound. By now evidence was mounting that Bin
Laden was there.
The discussions about what to do took place as American
relations with Pakistan were severely strained over the arrest of
Raymond A. Davis, the C.I.A. officer imprisoned for shooting two
Pakistanis on a crowded street in Lahore in January. Some of Mr.
Obama’s top aides worried that any military assault to capture or
kill Mr. Bin Laden might provoke an angry response from
Pakistan’s government, and that Mr. Davis could end up dead in
his jail cell. Mr. Davis was ultimately released on March 16,
giving a freer hand to his colleagues.
On March 22, the president asked his advisers their opinion
on the options.
Mr. Gates was skeptical about a helicopter assault, calling
it risky, and instructed military officials to look into aerial
bombardment using smart bombs. But a few days later, the
officials returned with the news that it would take some 32 bombs
of 2,000 pounds each. And how could the American officials be
certain that they had killed Bin Laden?
“It would have created a giant crater, and it wouldn’t have
given us a body,” said one American intelligence official.
A helicopter assault emerged as the favored option. The Navy
Seals team that would hit the ground began holding dry runs at
training facilities on both American coasts, which were made up
to resemble the compound. But they were not told who their target
might be until later.
Last Thursday, the day after the president released his
long-form birth certificate — such “silliness,” he told
reporters, was distracting the country from more important things
— Mr. Obama met again with his top national security officials.
Mr. Panetta told the group that the C.I.A. had “red-teamed”
the case — shared their intelligence with other analysts who
weren’t involved to see if they agreed that Bin Laden was
probably in Abbottabad. They did. It was time to decide.
Around the table, the group went over and over the negative
scenarios. There were long periods of silence, one aide said. And
then, finally, Mr. Obama spoke: “I’m not going to tell you what
my decision is now—I’m going to go back and think about it some
more.” But he added, “I’m going to make a decision soon.”
Sixteen hours later, he had made up his mind. Early the next
morning, four top aides were summoned to the White House
Diplomatic Room. Before they could brief the president, he cut
them off. “It’s a go,” he said. The earliest the operation could
take place was Saturday, but officials cautioned that cloud cover
in the area meant that Sunday was much more likely.
The next day, Mr. Obama took a break from rehearsing for the
White House Correspondents Dinner that night —to telephone
Admiral McRaven. to wish him luck.
On Sunday, White House officials canceled all West Wing
tours so that unsuspecting tourists and visiting celebrities
wouldn’t accidentally run into all the high level national
security officials holed up in the Situation Room all afternoon
monitoring the feeds they were getting from Mr. Panetta. A
staffer went to Costco and came back with a mix of
provisions—turkey pita wraps, cold shrimp, potato chips, soda.
At 2:05 p.m., Mr. Panetta sketched out the operation to the
group for a final time. Within an hour, the C.I.A. director began
his narration, via video from Langley. “They’ve crossed into
Pakistan,” he said.
Across the Border
The commando team had raced into the Pakistani night from a
base in Jalalabad, just across the border in Afghanistan. The
goal was to get in and get out before Pakistani authorities
detected the breach of their territory by what were to them
unknown forces and reacted with possibly violent results.
In Pakistan, it was just past midnight on Monday morning,
and the Americans were counting on the element of surprise. As
the first of the helicopters swooped in at low altitudes,
neighbors heard a loud blast and gunshots. A woman who lives two
miles away said she thought it was a terrorist attack on a
Pakistani military installation. Her husband said no one had any
clue Bin Laden was hiding in the quiet, affluent area. “It’s the
closest you can be to Britain,” he said of their neighborhood.
The Seal team stormed into the compound — the raid
awakened the group inside, one American intelligence official
said — and a firefight broke out. One man held an unidentified
woman living there as a shield while firing at the Americans.
Both were killed. Two more men died as well, and two women were
wounded. American authorities later determined that one of the
slain men was Bin Laden’s son and the other two were the courier
and his brother.
The commandos found Bin Laden on the third floor, wearing
the robes known as a shalwar kamiz, and officials said he
resisted before he was shot above the left eye near the end of
the 40-minute raid. The American government gave few details
about his final moments. “Whether or not he got off any rounds, I
frankly don’t know,” said Mr. Brennan, the White House
counterterrorism chief. But a senior Pentagon official, briefing
on the condition of anonymity, said it was clear Bin Laden “was
killed by U.S. bullets.”
American officials insisted they would have taken Bin
Laden into custody if he did not resist, although they considered
that likelihood remote. “If we had the opportunity to take Bin
Laden alive, if he didn’t present any threat, the individuals
involved were able and prepared to do that,” Mr. Brennan said.
One of Bin Laden’s wives identified his body, American
officials said. A picture taken by a Seal commando and processed
through facial recognition software suggested a 95 percent
certainty that it was Bin Laden. Later, DNA tests comparing
samples with relatives found a 99.9 percent match.
But the Americans faced other problems. One of their
helicopters stalled and could not take off, officials said.
Rather than let it fall into the wrong hands, the commandos moved
the women and children to a secure area and blew up the
malfunctioning helicopter.
By that point, though, the Pakistani military was
scrambling forces in response to the incursion into Pakistani
territory. “They had no idea about who might have been on there,”
Mr. Brennan said. “Thankfully, there was no engagement with
Pakistani forces.”
As they took off at 1:10 a.m. local time, taking a trove
of documents and computer hard drives from the house, the
Americans left behind the women and children. A Pakistani
official said nine children, from 2 to 12 years old, are now in
Pakistani custody.
The Obama administration had already determined it would
follow Islamic tradition of burial within 24 hours to avoid
offending devout Muslims, yet concluded Bin Laden would have to
be buried at sea, since no country would be willing take the
body. Moreover, they were not anxious to create a shrine for his
followers.
So the Qaeda leader’s body was washed and placed in a
white sheet in keeping with tradition. On the aircraft carrier
Carl Vinson, it was placed in a weighted bag as an officer read
prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by
a native speaker, according to the senior Pentagon official.
The body then was placed on a prepared flat board and eased
into the sea. Only a few sailors watching from one of the large
elevator platforms that move aircraft up to the flight deck were
witness to the end of America’s most wanted fugitive.

Copyright 2011 The New York Times Company

-0- May/03/2011 01:41 GMT


" This e-mail message, including any attached file, is confidential and legally privileged. It is solely for the intended receipient and if you received this e-mail by mistake, you should notify the sender immediately and delete this message from your system. You are further prohibited from disseminating, distributing or copying this e-mail. This e-mail cannot be guaranteed to be secure and error-free as it could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late, or incomplete, or contain viruses or other malicious programs. Unless it relates to business discharged by officials of the company, any views, opinions or factual assertions contained are those of the author and not necessarily of the Company. The Company prohibits unofficial use of its email and consequently disclaims and accepts no liability for any damage caused by any libelous and defamatory statements transmitted via this e-mail. "


__________________
Coffee. Good.
Page 1 of 1  sorted by
 
Quick Reply

Please log in to post quick replies.



Create your own FREE Forum
Report Abuse
Powered by ActiveBoard