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Excerpted:Videos seized from Bin Laden’s compound and released by the Obama administration on Saturday showed him wrapped in an old blanket watching himself on TV, like an aging actor imagining a comeback. A senior intelligence official said other videos showed him practicing and flubbing his lines in front of a camera. He was interested enough in his image, the official said, to dye his white beard black for the recordings. His once-large entourage of Arab bodyguards was down to one trusted Pakistani courier and the courier’s brother, who also had the job of buying goats, sheep and Coca-Cola for the...

CIA watched bin Laden from nearby safe house inside Pakistan By Augustine Anthony and Michelle Nichols Fri May 6, 1:44 am ET ABBOTTABAD/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Extensive surveillance of Osama bin Laden's hideout from a nearby CIA safe house in Abbottabad led to his killing in a Navy SEAL operation, U.S. officials said, a revelation likely to further embarrass Pakistan's spy agency and strain ties. The U.S. officials, quoted by the Washington Post, said the safe house was the base for intelligence gathering that began after bin Laden's compound was discovered last August, and which was so exhaustive the CIA...

Afghan intelligence had told Islamabad nearly four years back that the most hunted al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was hiding in an area near Abbottabad, but nothing was done about it as the claim was rejected by then president Pervez Musharraf, a former top spy has said. Osama bin Laden was shot dea d by US commandos who stormed his hideout in Abbottabad city May 2. Afghanistan's former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh told The Guardian newspaper in Kabul that the National Directorate of Security (NDS) sleuths had come to the conclusion as early as in 2004 that the world's...

There is no way Pakistan assisted the U.S. military operation of killing Osama Bin Laden. The Pakistani government is condemning the U.S. for entering its country. The army chief warned the U.S. that it will jeopardize their so called relationship if the U.S. invades Pakistan without their permission. Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir questioned the U.S. mission of violating Pakistan's sovereignty. Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf stated that the Bin Laden raid showed a lack of trust between the U.S. and Pakistan. Musharraf lied to the U.S. about trying to help kill terrorists within their borders. We should have never trusted...

Osama Bin Laden’s house, described by the US government as a $1 million mansion, has been priced by property experts in Pakistan at no more $250,000, The Guardian reports. Two property professionals in Abbottabad, the town where Bin Laden was killed last Sunday, said that much of the US government’s description was exaggerated. The house was built in 2005 and based on the size of the plot and recent property sales, they estimated that it would fetch no more than the equivalent of $250,000 in the current market. After Sunday’s raid by US Navy SEALs which led to the killing...

Does anyone swallow the Pakistani government's claim that Osama bin Laden lived in that Abbottabad villa for at least six years without anyone getting wind? As it happens, I know Abbottabad rather well, having visited it on several occasions since 1971. Situated in the lower recesses of the Pakistani uplands, the small town was used for centuries to keep a watch on the Khyber Pass. The British, who liked to recruit soldiers from the nearby Pathan and Punjab regions, built a garrison town there -- and then a military school to train Pathan and Punjabi non-commissioned officers, the backbone of...

Bin Laden's neighbors noticed unusual things ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan (AP) When a woman involved in a polio vaccine drive turned up at Osama bin Laden's hideaway, she remarked to the men behind the high walls about the expensive SUVs parked inside. The men took the vaccine, apparently to administer to the 23 children at the compound, and told her to go away. The terror chief and his family kept well hidden behind thick walls in this northwestern hill town they shared with thousands of Pakistani soldiers. But glimpses of their life are emerging — along with deep skepticism that authorities didn't...

Interesting commentary going on there right now.

The view from (some) on the right in regard to the Bin Laden news is: waterboarding is vindicated. One GOP Congressman tweeted: Wonder what President Obama thinks of water boarding now? The reason is that there's a direct line to be traced from the big news to data collected at GITMO -- data that was almost certainly collected under duress. Here's the key interrogation note regarding a courier going to Abottabad: Rest @ link

And the US Military currently has hundreds of experts combing-though a reported "treasure trove" of actionable Al Qaida intelligence contained in computer files snatched in Sunday's raid on the Abottabad compound. According to one US official: "They cleaned it out... can you imagine what's on Osama Bin Laden's hard drive?" A brief, interesting account of the AQ courier  who unwittingly got Geronimo scalped -here- _________________________________________________ More at Reaganite Republican _________________________________________________ The Pentagon Politico Bin laden compound diagram, pentagon, abbottabad compound diagram, xxx, Bin laden compound diagram, pentagon, abbottabad compound diagram, xxx, Bin laden compound abbottabad compound diagram, xx

Apparently, the key to the whole operation was finding and tracking Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, a process that took years — and involved info given by Guantanamo detainees: Sunday afternoon’s raid by U.S. forces that killed Osama bin Laden was the “culmination of years of careful and highly advanced intelligence work,” senior administration officials said in a conference call, describing the genesis of an operation that sounded like it was right out of a “Mission Impossible” movie. Some time after Sept. 11, detainees held by the U.S. told interrogators about a man believed to work as a courier for...