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Posted on 05/03/2011 7:16:15 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Would you care for some whipped cream and sprinkles on your sundae?
The assault force of Navy SEALs snatched a trove of computer drives and disks during their weekend raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, yielding what a U.S. official called “the mother lode of intelligence.”
The special operations forces grabbed personal computers, thumb drives and electronic equipment during the lightning raid that killed bin Laden, officials told POLITICO…
“Hundreds of people are going through it now,” an official said, adding that intelligence operatives back in Washington are very excited to find out what they have.
“It’s going to be great even if only 10 percent of it is actionable,” the official said.
Follow the link for tantalizing details about how the SEALs encountered Bin Laden in the compound and their reaction when they were told what the mission was. Who’s next on the hit list once we’re done analyzing the data? You guessed it:
Does bin Laden’s demise mean the death of al-Qaeda? CIA analysts won’t go that far. But they have concluded that the operation “will accelerate its demise,” and that the battered organization is now at a “tipping point” that could lead to collapse.
The hidden trophy of Sunday’s raid: The JSOC team captured intelligence materials from the compound that might reveal the location of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the organization’s new commander. “That’s where we’re going next,” says one U.S. official involved in planning the operation.
So at last, after fully a decade of wondering, we’ll have an answer to the question I asked in this post: Did Bin Laden have an actual job with Al Qaeda anymore or was he basically just being cc’d on messages and offering “spiritual encouragement”? Stories have popped up on the wires from time to time alleging that he’s still giving battlefield orders. Some that we’ve blogged were murky yet spectacular, like this one from Newsweek in 2007 alleging a power struggle between OBL and Zawahiri. More recently, in the fall of last year, U.S. officials claimed that Bin Laden had dispatched his couriers with instructions for a Mumbai-style attack in Europe or America. That report emerged in October — which we now know was after U.S. intelligence had already zeroed in on him in his Abbottabad compound. Wouldn’t surprise me if the hard drives confirm their suspicions.
According to Dianne Feinstein, he might have been living at the compound for the past six years. Six years. And somehow, supposedly, nobody knew.
Update: Was it even longer than six years? Was he there all along?
U.S. officials say detainees held at Guantanamo helped lead them to the courier.
In one early clue, according to a secret Pentagon cable made public by Wikileaks, senior Al Qaeda commander Abu al Libi told interrogators he became “the official messenger” for bin Laden and for a year in 2003 “moved his family to Abbottabad, Pakistan” — the city near Islamabad where bin Laden was killed Sunday.
Update: You know, I’m actually less interested in who Osama was talking to within Al Qaeda than who he was talking to within Pakistani intelligence. Let the probe begin:
Obama administration officials said Monday they would probe whether Pakistani authorities helped al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden stay in hiding for years, one day after he was killed by U.S. special forces at an outsize mansion complex located in the same city as Pakistan’s top military academy…
He didn’t specify which agencies of Pakistan’s government would be investigated. But privately, administration officials said the U.S. would have to probe for the possible involvement of Pakistan’s spy service and the military. “There are only so many agencies in the government that might have been involved,” said an official…
[An] ISI official acknowledged that Pakistanis are embarrassed by the raid. “It’s unfortunate, but we did not know about the people resident in that compound,” said the official. “That is a negative fallout that we have to live with.”
Couple reasons.
1) When their buddies in the ISI get done looking at the scene, they will learn that all the hard drives were ripped out of the computers, and other electronics were missing.
2) If you act like you have lots of information it makes interrogations easier. You pretend like you already know everything, and the detainee is just agreeing with you.
3) Just to be a jerk.
My thoughts, exactly. If they truly do have "the mother lode of intelligence" that they claim to, they just rendered much of it useless by blabbing that fact to our enemies.
I suspect that they don't have nearly as much intel as they claim, and are doing this to get the cockroaches scurrying.
They will find links to places and people that they will never release. China? Russian arms dealers with links to govt? Any Americans in contact with him? All above and beyond the links throughout the Arab world,that parts a no brainer.
You can bet we will never know 95% of what they find.
Paki government already moved him and made the intelligence involving him moot.
Barry thinks this is a feather in his hat he needed to get re-elected by the brainless Americans who elected him in the first place.
It was either Osama or Obama. Personnally, I think Obama is now next.
“Personally I think Bin Laden thought Obama was his friend(in relative terms). I think OBL thought he was safe from any covert action. That is exactly why he was living where he was.”
Evidence seems to point to him living in that town since at least 2003, so I don’t think Obama had anything to do with it.
Eight years in one place and we took that long to find him? Sheesh!
Coming soon on WikiLeaks.
Two of my three desktop computers are not connected to any outside sources.
One of my memory sticks holds more than 15,000 times the capacity than my $1600 hard drive circa 1988.
Not being connected to any outside sources sure beats having constantly to run anti-virus/trojan software.
Court order? Ummm, exactly which court could have written an order for search and seizure in Pakistan? Surely you aren’t suggesting that we approached a Pakistani court, knowing full well that we would have found an empty compound had we done so.
I'm all for modest wink-wink silence on the whole thing. I give Obama tons of credit for doing this using our troops and assets. I'm now looking for him to be the adult in the room about it and resist getting all full of Hammas style rowdy celebre'. I think if liberals and Obama had AK47's they would be wildly firing in the air every time a camera showed up.
Worth repeating.
It’s a lost cause. Most humans are confusing at best. They have an emotional randomness which overtakes real logic. As to why they do this I have no idea. It sure makes life hard for everyone. Maybe that’s what motivates them? Turn everything into a crisis and then react instead of accept reality and calculate. I know we’re not the Borg, but it has it’s up side.
I swear I didn’t see yours first! LOL.
I called it first! I'm the winner! Tiger's Blood!
Obama has enjoyed this so much he's about to kill Muhamar! To satisfy his base and OBL heat, the ICC is issuing an arrest warrant.
No, not eight years in that compound, because that was only built six years ago, according to what we’re being told. However, under “enhanced interrogation”, AQ leader al-Libbi told us that he became Bin Laden’s courier in 2003, and moved with his family to Abbottabad. Now, since we know that Bin Laden was living with his most recent set of couriers, in Abbottabad, it only stands to reason that al-Libbi had moved there because Bin Laden was already living there, 2 years before the compound was built!
The answer is simple - liberalism is a mental disorder.
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