Free Republic

SNIPPET: "Egyptian security forces have reportedly arrested a number of jihadists operating in the Sinai Peninsula who are linked to Ramzi Mowafi, a former physician for Osama bin Laden. Sources have told Egyptian media outlets that Mowafi's group has been responsible for numerous attacks in the Sinai over the past two years. Among those recently arrested are a Yemeni and a Palestinian who were found in the possession of maps and laptops. In August 2011, Egyptian security officials told CNN that Mowafi, who is also thought to be an explosives expert, was spotted in the Sinai. At the time, Mowafi,...

The U.S. commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden was guided from space by a fleet of satellites, which aimed dozens of separate receivers over Pakistan to collect a torrent of electronic and signals intelligence as the mission unfolded, according to a top-secret U.S. intelligence document. The National Security Agency was also able to penetrate guarded communications among al-Qaeda operatives by tracking calls from mobile phones identified by specific calling patterns, the document shows. Analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency pinpointed the geographic location of one of the phones and tied it to the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where an...

The 33-year prison sentence of a Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA locate Usama bin Laden has been overturned and a retrial has been ordered. Government administrator Feroz Shah said a senior judicial official, Sahibzada Mohammad Anis, issued the ruling Thursday because the person who originally sentenced doctor Shakil Afridi was not authorized to hear the case. Afridi, who was convicted in May 2012 of conspiring with Islamic militants in Pakistan’s Khyber tribal area for giving them money and medical treatment, will reportedly remain imprisoned at Peshawar Central jail until the retrial is concluded. No date has been set, BBC...

The body of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was not buried at sea, according to leaked emails of intelligence firm Stratfor, as revealed by WikiLeaks. Stratfor’s vice-president for intelligence, Fred Burton, believes the body was “bound for Dover, [Delaware] on [a] CIA plane” and then “onward to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda [Maryland],” an email says. The official version is that the body of Al-Qaeda’s top man, who was killed by a US raid in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, was buried at an undisclosed location at sea in a proper Muslim ceremony. "If body dumped at...

"Obama’s Former Bodyman: President Left Situation Room to Play ’15 Games’ of Cards During Day of Bin Laden Raid" On the day Navy SEALs were raiding Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and killing the 9/11 mastermind, President Obama didn’t spend every moment in the White House situation room. Instead, the commander in chief played cards in a private dining room that day, too — about 15 games of spades, in fact, his former personal assistant Reggie Love recently told a UCLA forum. “Most people were like down in the Situation Room and [Obama] was like, ‘I’m not going to...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://frontpagemag.com - A Scandal Bigger Than Benghazi?Posted By Arnold Ahlert On August 12, 2013 @ 12:40 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 5 Comments In a story that has remained largely under the mainstream media radar, Congress announced late last month that it would finally investigate the Aug. 6, 2011 helicopter crash in Afghanistan that resulted in 38 deaths, including 22 members of SEAL Team 6, made famous three months earlier when they killed Osama Bin Laden. Grieving family members insist that soldiers in the elite unit were placed in unnecessary danger by the recklessness of the Obama administration, whose actions...

What really happened to Navy SEAL Team 6? In August 2011, the elite special forces unit suffered the worst battlefield calamity in its history. A Taliban fighter shot down a Chinook helicopter carrying 22 Navy SEAL Team 6 members in Afghanistan. All 38 persons on board — the Navy SEAL warriors, other U.S. military personnel and seven Afghan soldiers — were killed. Grieving family members have been demanding answers. They may now get some as Congress finally opens an investigation. Navy SEAL Team 6 has attained international prominence for one reason: They were responsible for killing Osama bin Laden. They...

Did the Obama administration put a target on the backs of members of Navy SEAL Team 6? This is the question that parents of slain SEALs are now asking — and rightly so. Forget Benghazi, the IRS, Eric H. Holder Jr. and the National Security Agency spying on U.S. citizens. Important as these scandals are, what happened to SEAL Team 6 could very well dwarf them. Our government betrayed America’s finest warriors. Navy SEAL Team 6 became a household name for their role in killing Osama bin Laden. On May 1, 2011, the country rightly celebrated the death of bin...

USA Today had a very different Title for the Report Pakistan's Mea Culpa******************************************************* Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit leaked the report on Monday, The unit's Josh Berstein filed this report The unilateral decision by the US to launch a military operation to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden on Pakistani territory constituted "an act of war", a Pakistani government investigation has found.The report of the Abbottabad Commission, which investigated the circumstances around the raid and how the al-Qaeda leader came to live in the country for nine years without apparently being detected, was exclusively released by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit on Monday.The report of...

10. Osama Bin Ladin Wanted Joe Biden Alive, because he knew that Biden was more dangerous to Americans if he remained in power. Bin Laden ordered his militants to look out for opportunities to assassinate President Obama or David Petraeus during any of their visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan.(SNIP)But Bin Laden warned them not to bother targeting Vice-President Joe Biden because "Biden is totally unprepared for that post [of president], which will lead the US into a crisis." 9. Senator Ted Cruz likes this license plate, and who can blame him? 8. Politico, Media Matters, and HuffPo (but I repeat...

Following the military raid on the Bin Laden compound in 2011, the Pakistani government set up a commission of inquiry to find out exactly what happened, if there were any lapses in leadership, and what follow-on actions should be taken. Today, Al Jazeera published the exclusive report from the "Abottobad Commission," which performed the investigation. Inside their report were many interesting details, but we've managed to get it down to just five. Bin Laden was once stopped by a cop for speeding in 2002, but nothing happened. From the report: "Maryam, of course had no occasion to speak to the...

A secret Pakistani report leaked online on Monday provides a series of stunning revelations about the life and death of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, the long-time Al-Qaeda leader responsible for the 9/11 attacks against the United States in 2001.

Undated file picture of Saudi dissident Ossama Bin Ladin in an undisclosed place inside Afghanistan. Ossama Bin Ladin speaks while siting in front of a bannar inscribed basic Islamic tenet in Afghanistan. The billionaire Bin Ladin, member of a family of wealthy Saudi construction tycoon, is blamed for two bomb blasts in his home country in 1995-96 that killed 24 US servicemen. "Hello, officer, would you like an autograph?" According to an official Pakistani government investigation into how, exactly, Osama bin Laden was able to hide inside the country for nine years, the Al Qaeda mastermind was once nearly caught...

Report: Bin Laden lived undetected in Pakistan for 9 years after 9/11 By Jeremy Herb - 07/08/13 11:45 AM ET Osama bin Laden lived in Pakistan for nine years at six different locations before he was killed in 2011 by Navy SEALs at his home in Abbottabad, according to a Pakistani commission report. The report, which was conducted in the aftermath of the bin Laden raid, was made public Monday by Al Jazeera. The 336-page report holds both Pakistani politicians and the military responsible for “gross incompetence” and “collective failures” that allowed bin Laden to live undetected in Pakistan. Al...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The nation's top special operations commander ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public. The secret move, described briefly in a draft report by the Pentagon's inspector general, set off no alarms within the Obama administration even though it appears to have sidestepped federal rules and perhaps also the Freedom of Information Act

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed the name of the Navy SEAL unit that carried out the Osama Bin Laden raid and named the unit’s ground commander at a 2011 ceremony attended by Zero Dark Thirty filmmaker Mark Boal, according to a draft Pentagon inspector general’s report obtained by a watchdog group.

As we mentioned in an earlier editorial about her possible appointment as secretary of state, "In 1996, while serving as assistant secretary of state for African affairs under former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Rice helped persuade President Clinton to rebuff Sudan's offer to turn Osama bin Laden, who was then living there, over to U.S. authorities." Richard Miniter, author of the book "Losing bin Laden," told World Magazine in 2003 that Rice played a primary role in scuttling the deal in which Sudan could have turned over bin Laden to the U.S.

Note: Photo included with article. SNIPPET: "U.S. authorities have transferred Younis al-Mauritani, held in Afghanistan, to Mauritania, officials in the West African nation said on Saturday. Pakistan said in September 2011 it arrested al-Mauritani, better known in his homeland Mauritania as Youssouf Al Mauritani, during a joint operation with U.S. intelligence services." SNIPPET: "Pakistani military authorities said Al Mauritani was planning to attack U.S. economic interests including pipelines, hydro-electric dams and oil tankers when he was captured."

Loose talk by senior members of the Obama administration may have condemned Shakil Afridi, a Pakistani doctor who assisted America's hunt for Osama bin Laden, to 33-year term in prison on trumped-up charges. According to Fox News, an official 357-page report by the Pakistani government that examined the security failures that allowed the U.S. to evade that country's defenses in the raid on May 2, 2011 concluded that Dr. Afridi was implicated by a "statement by the U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who was the CIA Director when May 2 happened, confirming the role of Dr. Afridi in making the...

It was the Obama administration that sealed the fate of the Pakistani doctor jailed for helping nail Usama Bin Laden, by divulging key details after the fact and dooming any chance Shakil Afridi's cover story could win his freedom, according to a confidential Pakistani report. When former Secretary of Defense and ex-CIA Director Leon Panetta publicly acknowledged Afridi's role in the ruse which helped the CIA pinpoint Bin Laden's presence in an Abbottabad compound, any chance that Pakistani authorities could help him get out of the country vanished, according to what some have called Pakistan’s version of the 9/11 Commission,...