This article titled “US commando team that killed Bin Laden swoop on Somali pirates” was written by Karen McVeigh in New York, for The Guardian on Wednesday 25th January 2012 19.39 UTC

The special forces commandos who swept into Somalia under cover of darkness to rescue two hostages, an American woman and a Danish man, were part of Seal team six, the same navy unit that killed Osama bin Laden, it has emerged.

The Seals killed nine pirates on Tuesday night before rescuing Jessica Buchanan, 32, and Poul Hagen Thisted, 60. They had been held hostage for three months after their kidnap from Galkayo, in the Galmudug region of Somalia, last October.

President Barack Obama, who authorised the mission two days ago, made no mention of it in his state of the union address to Congress on Tuesday. But he was overheard congratulating the defence secretary, Leon Panetta, on a “good job tonight” as he entered the House of Representatives chamber to give his address.

Minutes after he had finished his speech, the president was on the phone to Buchanan’s father, John, to tell him that his daughter was safe.

Obama said in a predawn statement released by the White House on Wednesday: “Thanks to the extraordinary courage and capabilities of our special operations forces, yesterday Jessica Buchanan was rescued and she is on her way home.

“As commander-in-chief, I could not be prouder of the troops who carried out this mission, and the dedicated professionals who supported their efforts. The US will not tolerate the abduction of our people, and will spare no effort to secure the safety of our citizens and to bring their captors to justice,” he said.

The pair were working for the DGG, a land mine clearance unit of the Danish Refugee Council, which confirmed the hostages were unharmed and “on their way to be reunited with their families”.

A senior administration official who was not authorised to speak publicly told AP that new intelligence over the “deteriorating health” of Buchanan had prompted Obama to direct his security team to develop a rescue plan.

Mary Ann Olsen of the refugee council said Buchanan was “not that ill” and did not have to be hospitalised but did require medicine.

Olsen informed Thisted’s family of the successful military operation and said “they were very happy and incredibly relieved that it is over”. She said the freed hostages were in Djibouti and would soon be moved to a “safe haven”.

Pentagon officials have refused to discuss the details of the raid, which took place near the Somali town of Adado. But according to officials who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity, the rescue team, part of the naval special warfare development group, parachuted into the area before moving in on foot.

They arrived when the guards were asleep. A pirate who gave his name as Bile Hussein told AP the guards had been sleeping off the effects of the stimulant leaf khat, popular in Somalia, which they had been chewing for most of the evening. Hussein said he was not present, but had spoken to others who said that nine people had been killed and three were “taken away”. Officials said that the Seals had intended to capture the kidnappers, but, for reasons that have not been explained, nine were killed.

Following the operation, the rescue team and hostages flew by helicopter to Camp Lemonnier, a US base in Djibouti.

While the commandos were drawn from Seal team six, it is understood they were not the same personnel as those in the Bin Laden operation, and officials stressed that members of the other armed forces were also involved in the rescue.

When the pair were kidnapped, hundreds of Somalis demonstrated against the act in the streets.

“We are really happy with the successful release of the innocents kidnapped by evildoers,” Muhammad Sahal, an elder in Galkayo town, told AP. “They were guests who were treated brutally. That was against Islam and our culture … These men have spoiled our good customs and culture, so Somalis should fight back.”

Several hostages are still being held in Somalia, including a British tourist, two Spanish doctors seized from neighbouring Kenya, and an American journalist who was kidnapped on Saturday.

Negotiations with Somali pirates are notoriously tricky and they typically only release hostages for multimillion-pound ransoms. A British couple, Paul and Rachel Chandler, who were kidnapped from their yacht by Somali pirates in 2009 and held captive for 13 months, were finally freed in November 2010 after an undisclosed sum was paid.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

This article titled “Detained doctor who helped CIA find Bin Laden barred from leaving Pakistan” was written by Saeed Shah in Islamabad, for The Guardian on Tuesday 6th September 2011 15.53 UTC

The Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA track Osama bin Laden to his compound in the town of Abbottabad has been barred from leaving the country.

The official Pakistani commission investigating the al-Qaida leader’s presence in the country announced on Tuesday that Dr Shakil Afridi and others it wanted to question are banned from going abroad without its permission. This is a blow to Washington’s efforts to get Afridi freed from Pakistani custody and give him sanctuary in the US.

The Guardian revealed in July that, before bin Laden’s death in May, Afridi had set up a fake vaccination programme in Abbottabad in the hope of being able to obtain DNA samples from the house where the al-Qaida chief was suspected of living.

The CIA was never sure of bin Laden’s presence in the Abbottabad house, even when the decision was made to launch a unilateral American special forces operation to raid the compound on 2 May.

The doctor had been recruited by the CIA for an elaborate scheme to vaccinate residents for hepatitis B, a ploy to get a DNA sample from those living in the house to see if they were bin Laden family members.

Pakistani and American officials are at loggerheads over the fate of Afridi: Washington sees him as a hero, while Islamabad says that he committed a serious crime by working for a foreign intelligence agency. The commission’s latest decision will be helpful to the Pakistani authorities in resisting American demands to free Afridi.

The issue of Afridi is entangled in Pakistan’s anger over the operation to kill Bin Laden, which was undertaken without its knowledge, and the Pakistani military’s fears that the CIA has established an extensive spy network in the country using Pakistani citizens.

Afridi was arrested by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency three weeks after the bin Laden operation, on the outskirts of Peshawar, in north-west Pakistan. He has not been charged with any crime. His real job was working as a government health official, in charge of a part of the tribal area that borders Afghanistan. He has been held ever since. Washington wants to give Afridi and his wife and children a new life in the US.

Pakistan felt humiliated by the bin Laden operation: not only was the al-Qaida leader living comfortably in a picturesque garrison town, but an American special forces squad was able to enter its territory by helicopter and kill him before Pakistan’s defence forces were alerted.

The government named a five-member commission of inquiry in June, headed by a supreme court judge, “mandated to ascertain the full facts regarding the presence of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan”.

“Abbottabad Commission has imposed a ban on traveling abroad for all persons related to Abbottabad incident including Dr Shakil Afridi till further orders. No such person should be allowed to leave the country without clearance from the Abbottabad Commission,” the commission said in a statement.

Previously, the commission had barred the three wives of bin Laden, who had lived with him in Abbottabad and were taken into custody by Pakistani authorities, from leaving the country until it finishes its inquiries. Two of the wives are Saudi citizens, while the third is Yemeni. Several of bin Laden’s children, and possibly grandchildren, are also in Pakistani custody.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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This article titled “Pakistani PM: US promises not to repeat Bin Laden raid” was written by Julian Borger, diplomatic editor, for The Guardian on Thursday 21st July 2011 15.19 UTC

Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, says he has received US assurances there will be no repeat of the unilateral raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in May.

Gilani’s remarks, in an interview with the Guardian, contradict assertions by the US president, Barack Obama, and other American officials that US forces would take similar action against other al-Qaida leaders if necessary.

Gilani was speaking in London at a time when Pakistani relations with the west, particularly the US, are at a low in the wake of the raid on Bin Laden’s hideout in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad on 2 May.

After the special forces operation, US officials voiced suspicions that Bin Laden must have had a network of local supporters, possibly inside the Pakistani state, while Pakistani leaders were outraged not to have been consulted over the raid inside their territory.

“Since we were sharing information with US and there was a tremendous relationship with the CIA and ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence], therefore we could have done a joint operation in Abbottabad, but it didn’t happen. Therefore we had a lot of reservations,” Gilani said.

He added: “They have assured us in future there will be no unilateral actions in Pakistan, and there would be co-operation between both agencies.”

The Pakistani prime minister said he had received the assurance personally from the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. In her public statements, however, Clinton has declared the US would strike unilaterally against other top militants if others did not.

She said in May: “We’ve made it clear to people around the world that if we locate someone who has been part of the al-Qaida leadership, then you get him or we will get him.”

Speaking to the BBC just before his visit to Britain the same month, Obama was equally blunt on the issue. He said: “We are very respectful of the sovereignty of Pakistan. But we cannot allow someone who is planning to kill our people or our allies’ people – we can’t allow those kind of active plans to come to fruition without us taking some action.”

On Thursday, however, Gilani said any repeat of the Abbottabad raid would be “totally unacceptable”.

“Public opinion would further aggravate against the United States and you cannot fight a war without the support of the masses. You need the masses to support military actions against militants,” he said.

He said another raid would damage “not only our relationship, but also our common objective, to fight against militants. We are fighting a war and if we fail that means that it’s not good for the world. We can’t afford losing.”

After the raid against Bin Laden, the Pakistani government said it had stopped the US launching drones from its territory in pursuit of militants in tribal areas. Nevertheless, drone strikes on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan have continued.

“We don’t allow our bases to be used. They have other bases they use,” Gilani said. Asked where those bases were, he replied: “I don’t know. You ask the Americans. This is a question to put to them.”

The prime minister said: “Drone attacks are against our strategy too, because we have been isolating the militants from the local population and when there are drone attacks they get united again.”

Gilani deflected questions on some of the other irritants in US-Pakistan relations. On the allegation this month by the US chairman of the joint chief of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, that the Pakistani government had “sanctioned” the killing of journalist Saleem Shahzad, the prime minister said Mullen should present his evidence to the inquiry into the killing. He said he was not aware if the American had done so.

On FBI allegations this week that the Pakistani military, including the ISI, had spent $4m (£2.4m) on trying to influence US policy on Kashmir in Pakistan’s favour, and the arrest of a Kashmir separatist lobbyist alleged to have been involved, Gilani claimed he was not sufficiently well informed to comment. “I have been travelling. I don’t have full information,” he said.

On Wednesday night, Gilani told an audience of British and Pakistani business leaders at a London hotel that his country’s most important foreign relationship was with China.

“China is a rising power and Pakistan’s all-weather friend. This is a relationship that has no parallel. Uniquely, there are no downs but only ups in Pakistan-China relations. China is a source of pride and strength for us,” Gilani said.

The emphasis on the Chinese relationship has been a Pakistani government theme since the raid on Abbottabad and the cutting of US aid to Pakistan, but Gilani denied Islamabad was playing one world power off against another.

“We want to have relationships with both China and the United States. We don’t want to lose our relationship with the United States. We want to improve our relationship with the US [on the basis of] mutual respect and mutual interest,” the prime minister said.

However, he made it clear there was some way to go before that state was achieved. “It will take some time,” he said. “There can’t be a quick fix.”

Amid near-constant sniping from Washington, Gilani’s government found support from General David Petraeus, the departing US commander in Afghanistan who is soon to become CIA chief.

“I do believe they want to eliminate the al-Qaida presence and I do believe they want to eliminate the Taliban Pakistani presence,” Petraeus told journalists in Paris.

According to Reuters news agency, he said “it is credible [Pakistan] did not know” Bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

This article titled “US pressures Islamabad to free doctor who helped CIA track down Bin Laden” was written by Saeed Shah in Islamabad, for The Guardian on Tuesday 12th July 2011 19.05 UTC

Washington is pressing Islamabad to release a doctor being held for helping the CIA track down Osama bin Laden as the diplomatic falling-out between the countries grows more bitter.

Dr Shakil Afridi was arrested by Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency after it discovered he had been recruited by the CIA to run a fake vaccination programme in Abbottabad to try to get DNA samples from the al-Qaida leader’s suspected hideout.

American authorities are trying to rescue the Pakistani doctor, his wife and children, and take them to the United States, according to Pakistani and US officials.

The revelation that Bin Laden was living comfortably in northern Pakistan – and the clandestine operation by US special forces to kill him on 2 May – have pushed ties between Washington and Islamabad to breaking point. Over the weekend, the US announced that it would punish Pakistan for its lack of co-operation in the anti-terror fight by cutting $800m (£500m) in military aid.

In retaliation, Pakistan’s defence minister on Tuesday threatened to pull out over 100,000 troops posted on its side of the border with Afghanistan, which would be a security disaster for the coalition’s ongoing military campaign.

The recruitment of Afridi has added to the tensions. The doctor, in his late 40s, is thought to have been detained in late May or early June, and is not thought to have been charged. He is being held for working for a foreign intelligence agency, which can be punishable by the death penalty.

Friends say they last saw him attend the funeral of a distant family member in Peshawar, the provincial capital of the north-west, on 18 May. Afridi worked as the doctor in charge of Khyber, part of the tribal area, on the edge of Peshawar. It is believed that he was snatched by the ISI at Karkhano bazaar, a market for smuggled goods, on his way back home to Peshawar from work in Khyber, that lies between Peshawar and Khyber. He was initially held in custody in Peshawar, but may have been transferred to custody in Islamabad.

From a humble family, Afridi graduated in 1990 from Khyber Medical College, the top medical academy in the north-west of the country. He had been accused of corruption in the past but was cleared of misdoings, according to one person who knows him.

The CIA was never sure that Bin Laden was hiding inside the house in Abbottabad, northern Pakistan. It recruited Afridi, who set up a fake vaccination programme in Abbottabad. It was hoped that this would produce a DNA sample from one of the Bin Laden children. A nurse working for the doctor managed to get inside the compound, though it is not thought that the right DNA was obtained.

The Guardian revelations about the fake CIA vaccine programme made headline news in Pakistan on Tuesday, but government officials offered no comment.

Already chilly US-Pakistan relations grew colder in recent days with the news that Washington is to withhold $800m of military aid. Much of that money would have gone toward reimbursing Pakistan for the costs of keeping over 100,000 troops in the tribal area, guarding the border with Afghanistan, under a scheme known as Coalition Support Funds.

“This is money we have already spent on this war,” Ahmad Mukhtar, Pakistan’s defence minister, said in an interview with Express 24/7, a Pakistani news channel. “The next step is that the government or armed forces will remove these soldiers from the border.”

According to figures released by the US Congress, Washington has paid Pakistan $8.9bn in Coalition Support Funds since 2001. The money is meant to pay for the costs of maintaining the Pakistani troops in the tribal area.

Pakistan’s armed forces are accused of allowing militants to sneak across the border from safe havens in the tribal area to carry out attacks in Afghanistan. However, Pakistan says it maintains 1,100 border check posts and does its best to stop the flow. If those posts were removed, the Taliban would be able to pour across unhindered. But Mukhtar’s comments are likely to be a warning shot, as pulling out those troops from the tribal area would create a huge security threat for Pakistan too.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Here’s a Discovery Channel special about the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. This tells the most complete story to date about exactly how the mission came to be and what went down.

This article titled “Pakistan to return Osama bin Laden helicopter wreckage to US” was written by Declan Walsh in Islamabad, for The Guardian on Monday 16th May 2011 18.45 UTC

Pakistan will return the wreckage of the US special forces helicopter used in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden as a tentative first step towards hitting the reset button in their badly damaged relations.

Senator John Kerry announced the offer in Islamabad after 24 hours of meetings with Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership amid deep mutual mistrust and recriminations since Bin Laden’s killing on 2 May.

The US feared cutting-edge military technology in the tail of the helicopter, abandoned after US forces blew up the rest of the craft, could be reverse-engineered in China.

A joint statement following the talks reported “a constructive exchange of views” – diplomatic speak for tough-talking – but also an agreement to work together against “high value targets”. It was not clear if these targets included the Taliban leader Mullah Omar or al-Qaida’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, both of whom are believed to be in Pakistan.

Kerry, considered the “good cop” of US diplomacy with Islamabad, stressed the “extraordinary” nature of the mission that killed Bin Laden, saying it had been kept secret for operational reasons and not due to US mistrust of Pakistan. This claim contradicted earlier comments by the CIA chief, Leon Panetta, that Pakistani intelligence (ISI) had been excluded in case someone tipped off the al-Qaida leader.

“This had to be an American operation, and it had to be as secure as humanly possible,” he said. But he stopped short of alleging Pakistani complicity with Bin Laden, saying there was “no evidence at this point in time”.

The deal comes amid growing anti-American anger inside Pakistan, which on Friday passed a motion condemning the US raid and calling for a complete review of the relationship with the US, including potentially cutting Nato’s supply line to Afghanistan.

A senior Pakistani military official told the Guardian the raid had sparked vivid anti-American sentiment inside the armed forces, and that General Kayani had faced anger during a tour of military bases last week. There were also questions about the poor perfomance of the ISI, the official said, but rejected suggestions that agency personnel had helped Bin Laden.

Instead, he suggested, the US needed to make major concessions to rebuild the relationship including, he said, a nuclear cooperation deal similar to the one between Washington and India. But there are few signs that the US will make any concessions, with Kerry also under pressure from US senators who want to slash aid to Pakistan or cut relations entirely.

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This article titled “Osama bin Laden ‘vetoed’ killer tractor” was written by Jason Burke, for The Guardian on Thursday 12th May 2011 18.31 UTC

Osama bin Laden angrily vetoed a plot to fit rotating blades to a tractor and use it to “mow down the enemies of Allah”, on the grounds that it would cause “indiscriminate slaughter”, according to a US official familiar with material seized in the raid on the al-Qaida chief’s hideout.

The hoard of documents and computer discs taken by US special forces consisted more of “strategic musings” than concrete terror plots, the official told ProPublica, the US non-profitmaking investigative news organisation.

Though a fierce advocate of mass-casualty attacks in the west – elsewhere, Bin Laden attempts to calculate the number of Americans who would have to be killed to force the US to withdraw from the Arab world – he appeared angry at a suggestion by the Yemen-based al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula that a tractor or farm vehicle could, suitably adapted, be used in an attack.

The official told ProPublica: “Bin Laden said this is something he did not endorse. He seems taken aback. He complains that this tactical proposal promotes indiscriminate slaughter. He says he rejects this and it is not something that reflects what al-Qaida does.”

The tractor plan was mooted in Inspire, an English-language jihadi magazine, by a young US convert and al-Qaida recruit.

Bin Laden and his associates repeatedly admonished leaders of affiliated groups such as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula or al-Qaida in Iraq for not paying sufficient attention to avoiding targets that could not be portrayed as “legitimate” to the leadership’s target audience in the Middle East.

A series of letters and emissaries were sent to warn Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, to stop attacks on local Shia Muslims and to avoid civilian casualties. One senior al-Qaida figure close to Bin Laden told Zarqawi that he should be careful to avoid the fate of militants in Algeria in the 1990s who lost public support through indiscriminate and random violence.

Bin Laden also discusses which senior American political figures should be prioritised as targets. He dismissed an attack on Vice-President Joe Biden, saying he was of insufficient significance.

Other material seized shows how Bin Laden communicated with a small number of lieutenants mainly based in Pakistan, who then either executed his orders or tried to make sure all those in al-Qaida’s disparate and scattered affiliates were aware of his directives. Missives were carried by couriers as Bin Laden had no internet or telephone access.

It was a courier who eventually led the Americans to the al-Qaida leader.

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GOP Sen. Inhofe is the first member of Congress to see the secret Bin Laden death photos. He described them on Fox News.

(hat tip Conurls)

This article titled “Osama bin Laden sought ‘new 9/11′ to force US out of Middle East” was written by Ed Pilkington in New York and Declan Walsh in Islamabad, for The Guardian on Thursday 12th May 2011 00.31 UTC

Osama bin Laden went to the bizarre length of trying to calculate how many more American deaths it would take to force the US to retreat from the Middle East, his writings have revealed.

The al-Qaida leader was convinced that only a massive blood-letting on the scale of 9/11 would have the necessary shock factor to effect a change in US policy around the region. He told his followers that a sprinkling of smaller attacks would not have the desired effect.

The revelation of Bin Laden’s morbid emphasis on another mass atrocity comes from the large stash of his writings that was discovered in his hideout in Pakistan and brought by Navy Seals to the US after they killed him. The hoard, which has been compared in size to a small college library, included five computers and about 100 removable digital storage devices or flash drives. It also included a diary that Bin Laden wrote by hand.

US intelligence officers poring through the data told the Associated Press the information underlines how proactive Bin Laden continued to be even when al-Qaida as a movement was on the defensive. Though he didn’t appear to have the ability directly to co-ordinate specific attacks from his lair in Abbottabad, he did have input into every major al-Qaida plot, including those across Europe last year, the officials said.

He was also in touch with many of the most dangerous al-Qaida offshoots around the world that some had assumed were working independently, such as the branch in Yemen that has become a leading centre of al-Qaida activity.

He pointed the network in certain directions. One of his missives to his supporters was to stop focusing on the big cities, particularly New York, and spread their targets out to include Los Angeles and other smaller cities. That, he said, would make it easier to have the impact he sought– a high number of American deaths at the same time.

Similarly, he urged them not just to focus on planes but to target trains as well – an instruction that chimes with last week’s warning from US authorities alerting people to be especially vigilant on trains. And in a further indication of the al-Qaida leader’s thinking, AP says that he also plotted ways to encourage politicians in Washington to war with one another.

The insight into Bin Laden’s activities during the six years he is believed to have been hidden away in Abbottabad came as his adult sons called for the UN to launch an inquiry into the killing of their father. In a joint letter the family said it wanted to know “why an unarmed man was not arrested and tried in a court of law so that truth is revealed to the people of the world”. “Arbitrary killing is not a solution to political problems,” they said.

The letter was sent to the New York Times under the name of Omar bin Laden, the 30-year-old fourth son of Bin Laden who lived with the al-Qaida leader in Sudan and Afghanistan but has publicly denounced his attacks on civilians.

Drawing comparisons with Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, the statement said “international law has been blatantly violated” and, referring to the shooting of others in the compound, said Barack Obama had ordered “the execution of unarmed men and women”.

Bin Laden said it was “unworthy” of US special forces to kill an unarmed female family member and one of Osama bin Laden’s sons, identified in news reports as 22-year-old Khalid. Bin Laden’s family said it was calling on Pakistan to repatriate his three wives and several children, who are in military custody.

In a eulogy to Osama bin Laden posted on the internet yesterday, the leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, said his group would fight on. “What is coming is greater and worse, and what you will be facing is more intense and harmful.”

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I wrote last week about the Pentagon’s fear that China would end up with parts of the downed helicopter used in the raid against Bin Laden. The covert mission to kill the world’s most wanted terrorist ended up accidentally revealing to the world a secret stealth helicopter used by Special Forces. One of the special choppers clipped one of the walls of Bin Laden’s compound and was forced to make a hard landing. The Navy SEALs had no choice but to blow it up on site. Unfortunately, a tail rotor survived the blast intact and is now in Pakistani hands.

Pakistani officials said today that China has already privately expressed interest in seeing the tail rotor:

Pakistani officials said today they’re interested in studying the remains of the U.S.’s secret stealth-modified helicopter abandoned during the Navy SEAL raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound, and suggested the Chinese are as well.

The U.S. has already asked the Pakistanis for the helicopter wreckage back, but one Pakistani official told ABC News the Chinese were also “very interested” in seeing the remains. Another official said, “We might let them [the Chinese] take a look.”

Pakistan has some balls threatening to give our technology to the Chinese after we just busted them for harboring Osama bin Laden. These bastards are out of control. Even entertaining the idea of giving them $3 billion in aide this year is complete lunacy. These people are not and have never been our friends. They go along with us just enough to keep the money flowing but not enough to make any real difference in the War On Terror.

President Obama should call up President Zardari and inform him that we’re coming to get our tail rotor back. How much are we going to let these jerks get away with? This is a freaking embarrassment.